Papers › Unsupervised Representation Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Review

Unsupervised Representation Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Review

27 Aug 2022arXiv:2208.14226archive 2025-07-28

Nicolò Botteghi, Mannes Poel, Christoph Brune

This review addresses the problem of learning abstract representations of the measurement data in the context of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). While the data are often ambiguous, high-dimensional, and complex to interpret, many dynamical systems can be effectively described by a low-dimensional set of state variables. Discovering these state variables from the data is a crucial aspect for (i) improving the data efficiency, robustness, and generalization of DRL methods, (ii) tackling the curse of dimensionality, and (iii) bringing interpretability and insights into black-box DRL. This review provides a comprehensive and complete overview of unsupervised representation learning in DRL by describing the main Deep Learning tools used for learning representations of the world, providing a systematic view of the method and principles, summarizing applications, benchmarks and evaluation strategies, and discussing open challenges and future directions.

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