{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/prolonets-neural-encoding-human-experts","title":"Neural-encoding Human Experts' Domain Knowledge to Warm Start Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"1902.06007","date":"2019-02-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Andrew Silva","Matthew Gombolay"],"abstract":"Deep reinforcement learning has been successful in a variety of tasks, such as game playing and robotic manipulation. However, attempting to learn \\textit{tabula rasa} disregards the logical structure of many domains as well as the wealth of readily available knowledge from domain experts that could help \"warm start\" the learning process. We present a novel reinforcement learning technique that allows for intelligent initialization of a neural network weights and architecture. Our approach permits the encoding domain knowledge directly into a neural decision tree, and improves upon that knowledge with policy gradient updates. We empirically validate our approach on two OpenAI Gym tasks and two modified StarCraft 2 tasks, showing that our novel architecture outperforms multilayer-perceptron and recurrent architectures. Our knowledge-based framework finds superior policies compared to imitation learning-based and prior knowledge-based approaches. Importantly, we demonstrate that our approach can be used by untrained humans to initially provide >80% increase in expected reward relative to baselines prior to training (p < 0.001), which results in a >60% increase in expected reward after policy optimization (p = 0.011).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.06007v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.06007v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"prolonets-neural-encoding-human-experts","repo_url":"https://github.com/CORE-Robotics-Lab/ProLoNets","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"imitation-learning","task_name":"Imitation Learning"},{"task_slug":"openai-gym","task_name":"OpenAI Gym"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"starcraft","task_name":"Starcraft"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}