Accelerating Goal-Directed Reinforcement Learning by Model Characterization

4 Jan 2019  ·  Shoubhik Debnath, Gaurav Sukhatme, Lantao Liu ·

We propose a hybrid approach aimed at improving the sample efficiency in goal-directed reinforcement learning. We do this via a two-step mechanism where firstly, we approximate a model from Model-Free reinforcement learning. Then, we leverage this approximate model along with a notion of reachability using Mean First Passage Times to perform Model-Based reinforcement learning. Built on such a novel observation, we design two new algorithms - Mean First Passage Time based Q-Learning (MFPT-Q) and Mean First Passage Time based DYNA (MFPT-DYNA), that have been fundamentally modified from the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques. Preliminary results have shown that our hybrid approaches converge with much fewer iterations than their corresponding state-of-the-art counterparts and therefore requiring much fewer samples and much fewer training trials to converge.

PDF Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods