New RL technique achieves superior performance in control tasks

This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research. Reinforcement learning is one of the fascinating fields of computer science, and it has proven useful in solving some of the toughest challenges of artificial intelligence and robotics. Some scientists believe that reinforcement learning will play a key role in cracking the enigma of human-level artificial intelligence. But many hurdles stand between current reinforcement learning systems and a possible path toward more general and robust forms of AI. Many RL systems struggle with long-term planning, training-sample efficiency, transferring knowledge to new tasks, dealing with the inconsistencies of input signals and rewards, and other challenges that occur in real-world applications.