Exploring reinforcement learning techniques for discrete and continuous
  control tasks in the MuJoCo environment
Vaddadi Sai Rahul Debajyoti Chakraborty
We leverage the fast physics simulator, MuJoCo to run tasks in a continuous
control environment and reveal details like the observation space, action
space, rewards, etc. for each task. We benchmark value-based methods for
continuous control by comparing Q-learning and SARSA through a discretization
approach, and using them as baselines, progressively moving into one of the
state-of-the-art deep policy gradient method DDPG. Over a large number of
episodes, Qlearning outscored SARSA, but DDPG outperformed both in a small
number of episodes. Lastly, we also fine-tuned the model hyper-parameters
expecting to squeeze more performance but using lesser time and resources. We
anticipated that the new design for DDPG would vastly improve performance, yet
after only a few episodes, we were able to achieve decent average rewards. We
expect to improve the performance provided adequate time and computational
resources.