Massive practical works addressed by Deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm have indicated that stochastic policy, despite its simplicity, is the most frequently used exploration approach. However, most existing stochastic exploration approaches either explore new actions heuristically regardless of Q-values or inevitably introduce bias into the learning process to couple the sampling with Q-values. In this paper, we propose a novel preference-guided $\epsilon$-greedy exploration algorithm that can efficiently learn the action distribution in line with the landscape of Q-values for DQN without introducing additional bias. Specifically, we design a dual architecture consisting of two branches, one of which is a copy of DQN, namely the Q-branch. The other branch, which we call the preference branch, learns the action preference that the DQN implicit follows. We theoretically prove that the policy improvement theorem holds for the preference-guided $\epsilon$-greedy policy and experimentally show that the inferred action preference distribution aligns with the landscape of corresponding Q-values. Consequently, preference-guided $\epsilon$-greedy exploration motivates the DQN agent to take diverse actions, i.e., actions with larger Q-values can be sampled more frequently whereas actions with smaller Q-values still have a chance to be explored, thus encouraging the exploration. We assess the proposed method with four well-known DQN variants in nine different environments. Extensive results confirm the superiority of our proposed method in terms of performance and convergence speed. Index Terms- Preference-guided exploration, stochastic policy, data efficiency, deep reinforcement learning, deep Q-learning.

本文提出了一种新颖的基于偏好的 epsilon-greedy 探索算法，以数据效率为主要目标，并使用深度 Q 学习的算法作为研究对象，理论证明了这种算法在策略改进方面的有效性，并且实验证明了与相应的 Q 值风景线的拟合优良以及在四种著名的 DQN 变体中的优越表现。

基于偏好引导的随机探索增强学习高效采样方法