"Reinforcement learning is learning what to do – how to map situations to actions – so as to maximize a numerical reward signal. The learner is not told which actions to take, as in most forms of machine learning, but instead must discover which actions yield the most reward by trying them." – Sutton, Richard S. and Andrew G. Barto. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. (1.1). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.
Much of the previous work towards digital agents for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) has relied on text-based representations (derived from HTML or other structured data sources), which are not always readily available.