2016

Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialog Control

Asadi, Kavosh, Williams, Jason D.

Understand

Representing a dialog policy as a recurrent neural network (RNN) is attractive because it handles partial observability, infers a latent representation of state, and can be optimized with supervised learning (SL) or reinforcement learning (RL).

  • For RL, a policy gradient approach is natural, but is sample inefficient.
  • In this paper, we present 3 methods for reducing the number of dialogs required to optimize an RNN-based dialog policy with RL.
  • The key idea is to maintain a second RNN which predicts the value of the current policy, and to apply experience replay to both networks.

Built on

  • Simple statistical gradient-following algorithms for connectionist reinforcement learning

    Ronald J Williams · 1992

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • Long short-term memory

    Sepp Hochreiter and Jurgen Schmidhuber · 1997

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • Reinforcement Learning: an Introduction

    R Sutton and A Barto · 1998

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • Policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning with function approximation

    Richard S. Sutton, David McAllester, Satinder Singh, and Yishay Mansour · 2000

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • Off-policy temporal-difference learning with function approximation

    Doina Precup, Richard S Sutton, and Sanjoy Dasgupta · 2001

    Earlier work this paper cites.

Similar

Then

  • An empirical exploration of recurrent network architectures

    Rafal Jozefowicz, Wojciech Zaremba, and Ilya Sutskever · 2015

    Later among the works it cites.

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  • Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search

    David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Sander Dieleman Marc Lanctot, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel, and Demis Hassabis · 2016

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  • Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions

    Original

    Theano Development Team · 2016

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  • End-to-end lstm-based dialog control optimized with supervised and reinforcement learning

    Original

    Jason D. Williams and Geoffrey Zweig · 2016

    Closest in time.

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