Learning Intention-Aware Policies in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides an agent with an optimal policy so as to maximize the cumulative rewards. The policy defined in DRL mainly depends on the state, historical memory, and policy model parameters. However, we humans usually take actions according to our own intentions, such as moving fast or slow, besides the elements included in the traditional policy models. In order to make the action-choosing mechanism more similar to humans and make the agent to select actions that incorporate intentions, we propose an intention-aware policy learning method in this letter To formalize this process, we first define an intention-aware policy by incorporating the intention information into the policy model, which is learned by maximizing the cumulative rewards with the mutual information (MI) between the intention and the action. Then we derive an approximation of the MI objective that can be optimized efficiently. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the intention-aware policy in the classical MuJoCo control task and the multigoal continuous chain walking task.