Reinforcement Learning with Derivative-Free Exploration

Xiong-Hui Chen, Yang Yu

Abstract: Effective exploration is key to sample-efficient reinforcement learning. While the most popular general approaches (e.g., ε-greedy) for exploration are still of low efficiency, derivative-free optimization also invents efficient ways of exploration for better global search, which reinforcement learning usually desires for. In this paper, we introduce a derivative-free based exploration called DFE as a general efficient exploration method for early-stage reinforcement learning. DFE overcomes the disadvantage of optimization inefficiency and pool scalability in pure derivative-free optimization based reinforcement learning methods. Our experiments show DFE is an efficient and general exploration method through exploring trajectories with DFE in deterministic off-policy method DDPG and stochastic off-policy method ACER algorithms, and applying in Atari and Mujoco, which represent a high-dimensional discrete-action environment and a continuous control environment.