Towards Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Industry-near Environments
This addresses the need for more efficient and reliable autonomous agents in warehouse operations, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing model-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of low sample efficiency in reinforcement learning for industrial applications by introducing DVAE-2, a model-based algorithm, and shows it improves sample efficiency in a simulated warehouse environment compared to model-free methods.
Deep reinforcement learning has over the past few years shown great potential in learning near-optimal control in complex simulated environments with little visible information. Rainbow (Q-Learning) and PPO (Policy Optimisation) have shown outstanding performance in a variety of tasks, including Atari 2600, MuJoCo, and Roboschool test suite. While these algorithms are fundamentally different, both suffer from high variance, low sample efficiency, and hyperparameter sensitivity that in practice, make these algorithms a no-go for critical operations in the industry. On the other hand, model-based reinforcement learning focuses on learning the transition dynamics between states in an environment. If these environment dynamics are adequately learned, a model-based approach is perhaps the most sample efficient method for learning agents to act in an environment optimally. The traits of model-based reinforcement are ideal for real-world environments where sampling is slow and for mission-critical operations. In the warehouse industry, there is an increasing motivation to minimise time and to maximise production. Currently, autonomous agents act suboptimally using handcrafted policies for significant portions of the state-space. In this paper, we present The Dreaming Variational Autoencoder v2 (DVAE-2), a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that increases sample efficiency, hence enable algorithms with low sample efficiency function better in real-world environments. We introduce Deep Warehouse, a simulated environment for industry-near testing of autonomous agents in grid-based warehouses. Finally, we illustrate that DVAE-2 improves the sample efficiency for the Deep Warehouse compared to model-free methods.