"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.
Unlikeknowledge-based anddata-basedalgorithms, competence-based algorithms simultaneously address both the exploration challenge as well as distilling the generated experience in the form of reusable skills.
There are still, however, some unsolved challenges for a successful deployment of RL such as efficient learning of constrained or safe Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) [4].