Reinforcement Learning with Particle Swarm Optimization Policy (PSO-P) in Continuous State and Action Spaces

This article introduces a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approach for continuous state and action spaces. While most RL methods try to find closed-form policies, the approach taken here employs numerical on-line optimization of control action sequences. First, a general method for reformulating RL problems as optimization tasks is provided. Subsequently, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is applied to search for optimal solutions. This Particle Swarm Optimization Policy (PSO-P) is effective for high dimensional state spaces and does not require a priori assumptions about adequate policy representations. Furthermore, by translating RL problems into optimization tasks, the rich collection of real-world inspired RL benchmarks is made available for benchmarking numerical optimization techniques. The effectiveness of PSO-P is demonstrated on the two standard benchmarks: mountain car and cart pole.