Langevin DQN
This addresses the problem of enabling deep exploration in reinforcement learning for researchers and practitioners, offering a simpler incremental approach without complex uncertainty representations, though it appears incremental as it builds on DQN.
The paper tackles the challenge of deep exploration in reinforcement learning by introducing Langevin DQN, a variation of DQN that uses Gaussian noise in parameter updates, and demonstrates through computational study that it achieves deep exploration with improved efficiency.
Algorithms that tackle deep exploration -- an important challenge in reinforcement learning -- have relied on epistemic uncertainty representation through ensembles or other hypermodels, exploration bonuses, or visitation count distributions. An open question is whether deep exploration can be achieved by an incremental reinforcement learning algorithm that tracks a single point estimate, without additional complexity required to account for epistemic uncertainty. We answer this question in the affirmative. In particular, we develop Langevin DQN, a variation of DQN that differs only in perturbing parameter updates with Gaussian noise and demonstrate through a computational study that the presented algorithm achieves deep exploration. We also offer some intuition to how Langevin DQN achieves deep exploration. In addition, we present a modification of the Langevin DQN algorithm to improve the computational efficiency.