# Awesome Papers: 2016-11-1

### Towards Deep Symbolic Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) brings the power of deep neural networks to bear on the generic task of trial-and-error learning, and its effectiveness has been convincingly demonstrated on tasks such as Atari video games and the game of Go. However, contemporary DRL systems inherit a number of shortcomings from the current generation of deep learning techniques. For example, they require very large datasets to work effectively, entailing that they are slow to learn even when such datasets are available. Moreover, they lack the ability to reason on an abstract level, which makes it difficult to implement high-level cognitive functions such as transfer learning, analogical reasoning, and hypothesis-based reasoning. Finally, their operation is largely opaque to humans, rendering them unsuitable for domains in which verifiability is important. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning architecture comprising a neural back end and a symbolic front end with the potential to overcome each of these shortcomings. As proof-of-concept, we present a preliminary implementation of the architecture and apply it to several variants of a simple video game. We show that the resulting system though just a prototype learns effectively, and by acquiring a set of symbolic rules that are easily comprehensible to humans, dramatically outperforms a conventional, fully neural DRL system on a stochastic variant of the game.

### End-to-End Reinforcement Learning of Dialogue Agents for Information Access

Bhuwan Dhingra, Lihong Li, Xiujun Li, Jianfeng Gao, Yun-Nung Chen, Faisal Ahmed, Li Deng


This paper proposes $KB-InfoBot$ a dialogue agent that provides users with an entity from a knowledge base (KB) by interactively asking for its attributes. All components of the KB-InfoBot are trained in an end-to-end fashion using reinforcement learning. Goal-oriented dialogue systems typically need to interact with an external database to access real-world knowledge (e.g. movies playing in a city). Previous systems achieved this by issuing a symbolic query to the database and adding retrieved results to the dialogue state. However, such symbolic operations break the differentiability of the system and prevent end-to-end training of neural dialogue agents. In this paper, we address this limitation by replacing symbolic queries with an induced “soft” posterior distribution over the KB that indicates which entities the user is interested in. We also provide a modified version of the episodic REINFORCE algorithm, which allows the KB-InfoBot to explore and learn both the policy for selecting dialogue acts and the posterior over the KB for retrieving the correct entities. Experimental results show that the end-to-end trained KB-InfoBot outperforms competitive rule-based baselines, as well as agents which are not end-to-end trainable.

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