TA-Explore: Teacher-Assisted Exploration for Facilitating Fast Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for data-driven decisionmaking but suffers from sample inefficiency. This poses a risk to system safety and can be costly in real-world environments with physical interactions. This paper proposes a human-inspired framework to improve the sample efficiency of RL algorithms, which gradually provides the learning agent with simpler but similar tasks that progress toward the main task. The proposed method does not require pre-training and can be applied to any goal, environment, and RL algorithm, including value-based and policy-based methods, as well as tabular and deep-RL methods. The framework is evaluated on a Random Walk and optimal control problem with constraint, showing good performance in improving the sample efficiency of RL-learning algorithms.