A Recurrent Control Neural Network for Data Efficient Reinforcement Learning

In this paper we introduce a new model-based approach for a data-efficient modelling and control of reinforcement learning problems in discrete time. Our architecture is based on a recurrent neural network (RNN) with dynamically consistent overshooting, which we extend by an additional control network. The latter has the particular task to learn the optimal policy. This approach has the advantage that by using a neural network we can easily deal with high-dimensions and consequently are able to break Bellman's curse of dimensionality. Further due to the high system-identification quality of RNN our method is highly data-efficient. Because of its properties we refer to our new model as recurrent control neural network (RCNN). The network is tested on a standard reinforcement learning problem, namely the cart-pole balancing, where it shows especially in terms of data-efficiency outstanding results