Deep Learning for Reward Design to Improve Monte Carlo Tree Search in
  ATARI Games
  Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods have proven powerful in planning for
sequential decision-making problems such as Go and video games, but their
performance can be poor when the planning depth and sampling trajectories are
limited or when the rewards are sparse. We present an adaptation of PGRD
(policy-gradient for reward-design) for learning a reward-bonus function to
improve UCT (a MCTS algorithm). Unlike previous applications of PGRD in which
the space of reward-bonus functions was limited to linear functions of
hand-coded state-action-features, we use PGRD with a multi-layer convolutional
neural network to automatically learn features from raw perception as well as
to adapt the non-linear reward-bonus function parameters. We also adopt a
variance-reducing gradient method to improve PGRD's performance. The new method
improves UCT's performance on multiple ATARI games compared to UCT without the
reward bonus. Combining PGRD and Deep Learning in this way should make adapting
rewards for MCTS algorithms far more widely and practically applicable than
before.
