Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or robotics, where executing a policy in the environment is costly. In popular RL algorithms, agents typically explore either by adding stochasticity to a reward-maximizing policy or by attempting to gather maximal information about environment dynamics without taking the given task into account. In this work, we develop a method that allows us to plan for exploration while taking both the task and the current knowledge about the dynamics into account. The key insight to our approach is to plan an action sequence that maximizes the expected information gain about the optimal trajectory for the task at hand. We demonstrate that our method learns strong policies with 2x fewer samples than strong exploration baselines and 200x fewer samples than model free methods on a diverse set of low-to-medium dimensional control tasks in both the open-loop and closed-loop control settings.

通过规划最大化任务最优轨迹的期望信息增益的行动序列，使得该方法在较低的样本量下能够学习较强的策略，比探索基线算法少用2倍样本，比模型自由方法少用200倍样本。

基于规划的探索：关于最优轨迹信息的研究