Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in every possible state implies that the agent must understand, while also learning to maximize its reward, to ignore irrelevant actions such as $\textit{inapplicable actions}$ (i.e. actions that have no effect on the environment when performed in a given state). Knowing this information can help reduce the sample complexity of RL algorithms by masking the inapplicable actions from the policy distribution to only explore actions relevant to finding an optimal policy. This is typically done in an ad-hoc manner with hand-crafted domain logic added to the RL algorithm. In this paper, we propose a more systematic approach to introduce this knowledge into the algorithm. We (i) standardize the way knowledge can be manually specified to the agent; and (ii) present a new framework to autonomously learn these state-dependent action constraints jointly with the policy. We show experimentally that learning inapplicable actions greatly improves the sample efficiency of the algorithm by providing a reliable signal to mask out irrelevant actions. Moreover, we demonstrate that thanks to the transferability of the knowledge acquired, it can be reused in other tasks to make the learning process more efficient.

With the development of deep representation learning, the domain of reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful learning framework now capable of learning complex policies in high dimensional environments. This review summarises deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and provides a taxonomy of automated driving tasks where (D)RL methods have been employed, while addressing key computational challenges in real world deployment of autonomous driving agents. It also delineates adjacent domains such as behavior cloning, imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning that are related but are not classical RL algorithms. The role of simulators in training agents, methods to validate, test and robustify existing solutions in RL are discussed.

A long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence is lifelong learning. In lifelong learning, many tasks are presented in sequence and learners must efficiently transfer knowledge between tasks while avoiding catastrophic forgetting over long lifetimes. On these problems, policy reuse and other multi-policy reinforcement learning techniques can learn many tasks. However, they can generate many temporary or permanent policies, resulting in memory issues. Consequently, there is a need for lifetime-scalable methods that continually refine a policy library of a pre-defined size. This paper presents a first approach to lifetime-scalable policy reuse. To pre-select the number of policies, a notion of task capacity, the maximal number of tasks that a policy can accurately solve, is proposed. To evaluate lifetime policy reuse using this method, two state-of-the-art single-actor base-learners are compared: 1) a value-based reinforcement learner, Deep Q-Network (DQN) or Deep Recurrent Q-Network (DRQN); and 2) an actor-critic reinforcement learner, Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) with or without Long Short-Term Memory layer. By selecting the number of policies based on task capacity, D(R)QN achieves near-optimal performance with 6 policies in a 27-task MDP domain and 9 policies in an 18-task POMDP domain; with fewer policies, catastrophic forgetting and negative transfer are observed. Due to slow, monotonic improvement, PPO requires fewer policies, 1 policy for the 27-task domain and 4 policies for the 18-task domain, but it learns the tasks with lower accuracy than D(R)QN. These findings validate lifetime-scalable policy reuse and suggest using D(R)QN for larger and PPO for smaller library sizes.

The reinforcement learning paradigm is a popular way to address problems that have only limited environmental feedback, rather than correctly labeled examples, as is common in other machine learning contexts. While significant progress has been made to improve learning in a single task, the idea of transfer learning has only recently been applied to reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of transfer is that experience gained in learning to perform one task can help improve learning performance in a related, but different, task. In this article we present a framework that classifies transfer learning methods in terms of their capabilities and goals, and then use it to survey the existing literature, as well as to suggest future directions for transfer learning work.

Deep reinforcement learning is poised to revolutionise the field of AI and represents a step towards building autonomous systems with a higher level understanding of the visual world. Currently, deep learning is enabling reinforcement learning to scale to problems that were previously intractable, such as learning to play video games directly from pixels. Deep reinforcement learning algorithms are also applied to robotics, allowing control policies for robots to be learned directly from camera inputs in the real world. In this survey, we begin with an introduction to the general field of reinforcement learning, then progress to the main streams of value-based and policybased methods. Our survey will cover central algorithms in deep reinforcement learning, including the deep Q-network, trust region policy optimisation, and asynchronous advantage actor-critic. In parallel, we highlight the unique advantages of deep neural networks, focusing on visual understanding via reinforcement learning. To conclude, we describe several current areas of research within the field.

Adequately assigning credit to actions for future outcomes based on their contributions is a long-standing open challenge in Reinforcement Learning. The assumptions of the most commonly used credit assignment method are disadvantageous in tasks where the effects of decisions are not immediately evident. Furthermore, this method can only evaluate actions that have been selected by the agent, making it highly inefficient. Still, no alternative methods have been widely adopted in the field. Hindsight Credit Assignment is a promising, but still unexplored candidate, which aims to solve the problems of both long-term and counterfactual credit assignment. In this thesis, we empirically investigate Hindsight Credit Assignment to identify its main benefits, and key points to improve. Then, we apply it to factored state representations, and in particular to state representations based on the causal structure of the environment. In this setting, we propose a variant of Hindsight Credit Assignment that effectively exploits a given causal structure. We show that our modification greatly decreases the workload of Hindsight Credit Assignment, making it more efficient and enabling it to outperform the baseline credit assignment method on various tasks. This opens the way to other methods based on given or learned causal structures.

顺序决策的两种常见方法是AI计划（AIP）和强化学习（RL）。每个都有优点和缺点。 AIP是可解释的，易于与象征知识集成，并且通常是有效的，但需要前期逻辑域的规范，并且对噪声敏感； RL仅需要奖励的规范，并且对噪声是强大的，但效率低下，不容易提供外部知识。我们提出了一种综合方法，将高级计划与RL结合在一起，保留可解释性，转移和效率，同时允许对低级计划行动进行强有力的学习。我们的方法通过在AI计划问题的状态过渡模型与Markov决策过程（MDP）的抽象状态过渡系统（MDP）之间建立对应关系，从而定义了AIP操作员的分层增强学习（HRL）的选项。通过添加内在奖励来鼓励MDP和AIP过渡模型之间的一致性来学习选项。我们通过比较Minigrid和N房间环境中RL和HRL算法的性能来证明我们的综合方法的好处，从而显示了我们方法比现有方法的优势。

强化学习和最近的深度增强学习是解决如Markov决策过程建模的顺序决策问题的流行方法。问题和选择算法和超参数的RL建模需要仔细考虑，因为不同的配置可能需要完全不同的性能。这些考虑因素主要是RL专家的任务;然而，RL在研究人员和系统设计师不是RL专家的其他领域中逐渐变得流行。此外，许多建模决策，例如定义状态和动作空间，批次的大小和批量更新的频率以及时间戳的数量通常是手动进行的。由于这些原因，RL框架的自动化不同组成部分具有重要意义，近年来它引起了很多关注。自动RL提供了一个框架，其中RL的不同组件包括MDP建模，算法选择和超参数优化是自动建模和定义的。在本文中，我们探讨了可以在自动化RL中使用的文献和目前的工作。此外，我们讨论了Autorl中的挑战，打开问题和研究方向。

在本文中，我们提出了一种新的马尔可夫决策过程学习分层表示的方法。我们的方法通过将状态空间划分为子集，并定义用于在分区之间执行转换的子任务。我们制定将状态空间作为优化问题分区的问题，该优化问题可以使用梯度下降给出一组采样的轨迹来解决，使我们的方法适用于大状态空间的高维问题。我们经验验证方法，通过表示它可以成功地在导航域中成功学习有用的分层表示。一旦了解到，分层表示可以用于解决给定域中的不同任务，从而概括跨任务的知识。

深度强化学习（DRL）和深度多机构的强化学习（MARL）在包括游戏AI，自动驾驶汽车，机器人技术等各种领域取得了巨大的成功。但是，众所周知，DRL和Deep MARL代理的样本效率低下，即使对于相对简单的问题设置，通常也需要数百万个相互作用，从而阻止了在实地场景中的广泛应用和部署。背后的一个瓶颈挑战是众所周知的探索问题，即如何有效地探索环境和收集信息丰富的经验，从而使政策学习受益于最佳研究。在稀疏的奖励，吵闹的干扰，长距离和非平稳的共同学习者的复杂环境中，这个问题变得更加具有挑战性。在本文中，我们对单格和多代理RL的现有勘探方法进行了全面的调查。我们通过确定有效探索的几个关键挑战开始调查。除了上述两个主要分支外，我们还包括其他具有不同思想和技术的著名探索方法。除了算法分析外，我们还对一组常用基准的DRL进行了全面和统一的经验比较。根据我们的算法和实证研究，我们终于总结了DRL和Deep Marl中探索的公开问题，并指出了一些未来的方向。

尽管在许多具有挑战性的问题中取得了成功，但增强学习（RL）仍然面临样本效率低下，可以通过将先验知识引入代理人来缓解。但是，在加强学习方面的许多转移技术使教师是专家的局限性假设。在本文中，我们将增强学习中的行动作为推理框架 - 即，在每个状态下的行动分布，类似于教师政策，而不是贝叶斯的先验 - 恢复最先进的策略蒸馏技术。然后，我们提出了一类自适应方法，这些方法可以通过结合奖励成型和辅助正则化损失来鲁sumply动作先验。与先前的工作相反，我们开发了利用次优的动作先验的算法，这些算法可能仍然传授有价值的知识 - 我们称之为软动作先验。拟议的算法通过根据教师在每个州的有用性的估计来调整教师反馈的强度来适应。我们执行表格实验，这表明所提出的方法达到了最先进的性能，在从次优先的先验中学习时超过了它。最后，我们证明了自适应算法在连续动作中的鲁棒性深度RL问题，与现有的策略蒸馏方法相比，自适应算法显着提高了稳定性。

Safe Reinforcement Learning can be defined as the process of learning policies that maximize the expectation of the return in problems in which it is important to ensure reasonable system performance and/or respect safety constraints during the learning and/or deployment processes. We categorize and analyze two approaches of Safe Reinforcement Learning. The first is based on the modification of the optimality criterion, the classic discounted finite/infinite horizon, with a safety factor. The second is based on the modification of the exploration process through the incorporation of external knowledge or the guidance of a risk metric. We use the proposed classification to survey the existing literature, as well as suggesting future directions for Safe Reinforcement Learning.

由于数据量增加，金融业的快速变化已经彻底改变了数据处理和数据分析的技术，并带来了新的理论和计算挑战。与古典随机控制理论和解决财务决策问题的其他分析方法相比，解决模型假设的财务决策问题，强化学习（RL）的新发展能够充分利用具有更少模型假设的大量财务数据并改善复杂的金融环境中的决策。该调查纸目的旨在审查最近的资金途径的发展和使用RL方法。我们介绍了马尔可夫决策过程，这是许多常用的RL方法的设置。然后引入各种算法，重点介绍不需要任何模型假设的基于价值和基于策略的方法。连接是用神经网络进行的，以扩展框架以包含深的RL算法。我们的调查通过讨论了这些RL算法在金融中各种决策问题中的应用，包括最佳执行，投资组合优化，期权定价和对冲，市场制作，智能订单路由和Robo-Awaring。

资产分配（或投资组合管理）是确定如何最佳将有限预算的资金分配给一系列金融工具/资产（例如股票）的任务。这项研究调查了使用无模型的深RL代理应用于投资组合管理的增强学习（RL）的性能。我们培训了几个RL代理商的现实股票价格，以学习如何执行资产分配。我们比较了这些RL剂与某些基线剂的性能。我们还比较了RL代理，以了解哪些类别的代理表现更好。从我们的分析中，RL代理可以执行投资组合管理的任务，因为它们的表现明显优于基线代理（随机分配和均匀分配）。四个RL代理（A2C，SAC，PPO和TRPO）总体上优于最佳基线MPT。这显示了RL代理商发现更有利可图的交易策略的能力。此外，基于价值和基于策略的RL代理之间没有显着的性能差异。演员批评者的表现比其他类型的药物更好。同样，在政策代理商方面的表现要好，因为它们在政策评估方面更好，样品效率在投资组合管理中并不是一个重大问题。这项研究表明，RL代理可以大大改善资产分配，因为它们的表现优于强基础。基于我们的分析，在政策上，参与者批评的RL药物显示出最大的希望。

众所周知，在漫长的地平线和稀疏的奖励任务中，加强学习（RL）是困难的，需要大量的培训步骤。加快该过程的标准解决方案是利用额外的奖励信号，将其塑造以更好地指导学习过程。在语言条件的RL的背景下，语言输入的抽象和概括属性为更有效地塑造奖励的方式提供了机会。在本文中，我们利用这一想法并提出了一种自动奖励塑形方法，代理商从一般语言目标中提取辅助目标。这些辅助目标使用问题生成（QG）和问题答案（QA）系统：它们包括导致代理商尝试使用其自己的轨迹重建有关全球目标的部分信息的问题。当它成功时，它会获得与对答案的信心成正比的内在奖励。这激励代理生成轨迹，这些轨迹明确解释了一般语言目标的各个方面。我们的实验研究表明，这种方法不需要工程师干预来设计辅助目标，可以通过有效指导探索来提高样品效率。

Recent advances in batch (offline) reinforcement learning have shown promising results in learning from available offline data and proved offline reinforcement learning to be an essential toolkit in learning control policies in a model-free setting. An offline reinforcement learning algorithm applied to a dataset collected by a suboptimal non-learning-based algorithm can result in a policy that outperforms the behavior agent used to collect the data. Such a scenario is frequent in robotics, where existing automation is collecting operational data. Although offline learning techniques can learn from data generated by a sub-optimal behavior agent, there is still an opportunity to improve the sample complexity of existing offline reinforcement learning algorithms by strategically introducing human demonstration data into the training process. To this end, we propose a novel approach that uses uncertainty estimation to trigger the injection of human demonstration data and guide policy training towards optimal behavior while reducing overall sample complexity. Our experiments show that this approach is more sample efficient when compared to a naive way of combining expert data with data collected from a sub-optimal agent. We augmented an existing offline reinforcement learning algorithm Conservative Q-Learning with our approach and performed experiments on data collected from MuJoCo and OffWorld Gym learning environments.

深入学习的强化学习（RL）的结合导致了一系列令人印象深刻的壮举，许多相信（深）RL提供了一般能力的代理。然而，RL代理商的成功往往对培训过程中的设计选择非常敏感，这可能需要繁琐和易于易于的手动调整。这使得利用RL对新问题充满挑战，同时也限制了其全部潜力。在许多其他机器学习领域，AutomL已经示出了可以自动化这样的设计选择，并且在应用于RL时也会产生有希望的初始结果。然而，自动化强化学习（AutorL）不仅涉及Automl的标准应用，而且还包括RL独特的额外挑战，其自然地产生了不同的方法。因此，Autorl已成为RL中的一个重要研究领域，提供来自RNA设计的各种应用中的承诺，以便玩游戏等游戏。鉴于RL中考虑的方法和环境的多样性，在不同的子领域进行了大部分研究，从Meta学习到进化。在这项调查中，我们寻求统一自动的领域，我们提供常见的分类法，详细讨论每个区域并对研究人员来说是一个兴趣的开放问题。

将有用的背景知识传达给加强学习（RL）代理是加速学习的重要方法。我们介绍了Rlang，这是一种特定领域的语言（DSL），用于将域知识传达给RL代理。与RL社区提出的其他现有DSL不同，该基础是决策形式主义的单个要素（例如，奖励功能或政策功能），RLANG可以指定有关马尔可夫决策过程中每个元素的信息。我们为rlang定义了精确的语法和基础语义，并提供了解析器实施，将rlang程序基于算法 - 敏捷的部分世界模型和政策，可以由RL代理利用。我们提供一系列示例RLANG程序，并演示不同的RL方法如何利用所得的知识，包括无模型和基于模型的表格算法，分层方法和深度RL算法（包括策略梯度和基于价值的方法）。

在过去的十年中，多智能经纪人强化学习（Marl）已经有了重大进展，但仍存在许多挑战，例如高样本复杂性和慢趋同稳定的政策，在广泛的部署之前需要克服，这是可能的。然而，在实践中，许多现实世界的环境已经部署了用于生成策略的次优或启发式方法。一个有趣的问题是如何最好地使用这些方法作为顾问，以帮助改善多代理领域的加强学习。在本文中，我们提供了一个原则的框架，用于将动作建议纳入多代理设置中的在线次优顾问。我们描述了在非传记通用随机游戏环境中提供多种智能强化代理（海军上将）的问题，并提出了两种新的基于Q学习的算法：海军上将决策（海军DM）和海军上将 - 顾问评估（Admiral-AE） ，这使我们能够通过适当地纳入顾问（Admiral-DM）的建议来改善学习，并评估顾问（Admiral-AE）的有效性。我们从理论上分析了算法，并在一般加上随机游戏中提供了关于他们学习的定点保证。此外，广泛的实验说明了这些算法：可以在各种环境中使用，具有对其他相关基线的有利相比的性能，可以扩展到大状态行动空间，并且对来自顾问的不良建议具有稳健性。

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of exploration, resulting from the variance of the representing distribution. Entropy can play an essential role in policy optimization by selecting the stochastic policy, which eventually helps better explore the environment in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the stochasticity often reduces as the training progresses; thus, the policy becomes less exploratory. Additionally, certain parametric distributions might only work for some environments and require extensive hyperparameter tuning. This paper aims to mitigate these issues. In particular, we propose an algorithm called Robust Policy Optimization (RPO), which leverages a perturbed distribution. We hypothesize that our method encourages high-entropy actions and provides a way to represent the action space better. We further provide empirical evidence to verify our hypothesis. We evaluated our methods on various continuous control tasks from DeepMind Control, OpenAI Gym, Pybullet, and IsaacGym. We observed that in many settings, RPO increases the policy entropy early in training and then maintains a certain level of entropy throughout the training period. Eventually, our agent RPO shows consistently improved performance compared to PPO and other techniques: entropy regularization, different distributions, and data augmentation. Furthermore, in several settings, our method stays robust in performance, while other baseline mechanisms fail to improve and even worsen the performance.