Evaluating the progress of Deep Reinforcement Learning in the real world: aligning domain-agnostic and domain-specific research
This work tackles the problem of aligning research efforts to improve DRL deployment for real-world applications, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge without new empirical results.
The paper reviews and evaluates deep reinforcement learning (DRL) research to address deployment challenges in real-world autonomous systems, identifying five gaps in domain-agnostic work and discussing success stories and failures from domain-specific perspectives.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is considered a potential framework to improve many real-world autonomous systems; it has attracted the attention of multiple and diverse fields. Nevertheless, the successful deployment in the real world is a test most of DRL models still need to pass. In this work we focus on this issue by reviewing and evaluating the research efforts from both domain-agnostic and domain-specific communities. On one hand, we offer a comprehensive summary of DRL challenges and summarize the different proposals to mitigate them; this helps identifying five gaps of domain-agnostic research. On the other hand, from the domain-specific perspective, we discuss different success stories and argue why other models might fail to be deployed. Finally, we take up on ways to move forward accounting for both perspectives.