Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been one of the most successful approaches for learning in sequential decision making problems, the sample-complexity of RL techniques still represents a major challenge for practical applications. To combat this challenge, whenever a competent policy (e.g., either a legacy system or a human demonstrator) is available, the agent could leverage samples from this policy (advice) to improve sample-efficiency. However, advice is normally limited, hence it should ideally be directed to states where the agent is uncertain on the best action to execute. In this work, we propose Requesting Confidence-Moderated Policy advice (RCMP), an action-advising framework where the agent asks for advice when its epistemic uncertainty is high for a certain state. RCMP takes into account that the advice is limited and might be suboptimal. We also describe a technique to estimate the agent uncertainty by performing minor modifications in standard value-function-based RL methods. Our empirical evaluations show that RCMP performs better than Importance Advising, not receiving advice, and receiving it at random states in Gridworld and Atari Pong scenarios.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{da2020uncertainty,
title={Uncertainty-Aware Action Advising for Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents},
author={Da Silva, Felipe Leno and Hernandez-Leal, Pablo and Kartal, Bilal and Taylor, Matthew E},
booktitle={Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
year={2020}
}

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