Trial-and-error based reinforcement learning (RL) has seen rapid advancements
in recent times, especially with the advent of deep neural networks. However,
the majority of autonomous RL algorithms require a large number of interactions
with the environment. A large number of interactions may be impractical in many
real-world applications, such as robotics, and many practical systems have to
obey limitations in the form of state space or control constraints. To reduce
the number of system interactions while simultaneously handling constraints, we
propose a model-based RL framework based on probabilistic Model Predictive
Control (MPC). In particular, we propose to learn a probabilistic transition
model using Gaussian Processes (GPs) to incorporate model uncertainty into
long-term predictions, thereby, reducing the impact of model errors. We then
use MPC to find a control sequence that minimises the expected long-term cost.
We provide theoretical guarantees for first-order optimality in the GP-based
transition models with deterministic approximate inference for long-term
planning. We demonstrate that our approach does not only achieve
state-of-the-art data efficiency, but also is a principled way for RL in
constrained environments.

本文提出了基于概率模型预测控制（MPC）的基于模型的 RL 框架，以减少与环境的相互作用次数的方法。该方法使用高斯过程学习概率转换模型来减少模型误差的影响，同时使用 MPC 找到最小化预期长期成本的控制序列，以达到在受限环境下使用 RL 的目的。