Reinforcement Learning in 2018, best tips and tricks?
Have you looked at the Rainbow RL? It combines all improvements of RL. Apart from structural changes other improvements come from Reward Shaping, Curiosity-driven Learning, RL with Unsupervised Auxiliary tasks and RL with external memory (e.g. Neural Episodic Control, Model-free episodic Control). It's pitty that you leave out from your question Policy Gradients, they are lots of fun :) Happy reading!