The Blindfolded Controller: Decision Model-Guided Training for Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework for continuous improvement through interaction with an environment. However, RL agents struggle against tasks that offer exploration challenges and sparse rewards, because learning efficient policies from scratch is slow and sample-inefficient. In contrast, decision models (DMs), given a description of the environment and task, can perform well in sparse-reward tasks, but, as they do not learn from reward, they are not able to improve towards the optimal solution. In this paper, we present Decision Model-Guided Training (DMGT), a technique that uses a DM with a description of the environment and task to initialise an RL policy, combining the DM's ability to act without training with RL's ability to improve from reward. Instead of exploring from scratch, the agent reaches the goal and receives reward from its first episodes, and RL then improves its policy beyond what the DM achieves. We demonstrate through experiments on seven tasks that our approach outperforms RL in all seven and DM in five. In addition, we provide comprehensive guidelines, derived from ablation studies, for describing an environment and task to a DM.