Title: Goal-oriented Trajectories for Efficient Exploration,
Abstract: Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even
recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple
epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do
not succeed to properly expand the exploration area in most environments and
propose to replace single random action choices by random goals selection
followed by several steps in their direction. This approach is compatible with
any curiosity-based exploration and off-policy reinforcement learning agents
and generates longer and safer trajectories than individual random actions. To
illustrate this, we present a task-independent agent that learns to reach
coordinates in screen frames and demonstrate its ability to explore with the
game Super Mario Bros. improving significantly the score of a baseline DQN
agent.