(Feb 19th) Scaling deep reinforcement learning to challenging domains

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in a range of challenging domains, such as board games, video games, and robotic control tasks. Scaling RL to many applications, however, is yet precluded by a number of challenges. One such challenge lies in improving the sample-efficiency of RL algorithms, especially when learning with high-dimensional inputs (e.g., pixels).  For example, the state-of-the-art results with direct access to the state were two orders of magnitude more data-efficient than learning from pixels on the standard DeepMind Control Suite benchmark. In this presentation, I will first introduce recent works for sample-efficient deep RL, including RAD (data augmentation), ATC (representation learning), and RE3 (exploration). Another challenge in scaling RL is on providing a suitable reward function that is sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. For example, real-world problems may require extensive instrumentation, or it may be hard to reflect social norms in the hand-engineered reward function. To handle this issue, I will also introduce a new interactive framework, which enables us to utilize RL without a well-designed reward function.