Continuous Control with a Combination of Supervised and Reinforcement Learning

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers via the DOI in this record.Reinforcement learning methods have recently achieved impressive results on a wide range of control problems. However, especially with complex inputs, they still require an extensive amount of training data in order to converge to a meaningful solution. This limits their applicability to complex input spaces such as video signals, and makes them impractical for use in complex real world problems, including many of those for video based control. Supervised learning, on the contrary, is capable of learning on a relatively limited number of samples, but relies on arbitrary hand-labelling of data rather than taskderived reward functions, and hence do not yield independent control policies. In this article we propose a novel, modelfree approach, which uses a combination of reinforcement and supervised learning for autonomous control and paves the way towards policy based control in real world environments. We use SpeedDreams/TORCS video game to demonstrate that our approach requires much less samples (hundreds of thousands against millions or tens of millions) comparing to the state-of-theart reinforcement learning techniques on similar data, and at the same time overcomes both supervised and reinforcement learning approaches in terms of quality. Additionally, we demonstrate applicability of the method to MuJoCo control problems.The authors are grateful for the support by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) project DEVA EP/N035399/1