Title: Farsighter: Efficient Multi-step Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning. Abstract: Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL),  especially uncertainty-based exploration, plays a key role in improving sample efficiency and boosting total reward. Uncertainty-based exploration methods often measure the uncertainty (variance) of the value function;
However, existing exploration strategies either only consider the uncertain impact of next ``one-step'' or propagate the uncertainty for all the remaining steps in an episode. Neither approach can explicitly control the bias-variance trade-off of the value function.
In this paper, we propose Farsighter, an explicit multi-step uncertainty exploration framework in DRL. Specifically, Farsighter considers the uncertainty of exact k future steps and it can adaptively adjust k. In practice, we learn Bayesian posterior over Q-function to approximate uncertainty in each step. In model-free cases, we recursively deploy Thompson sampling on the learned posterior distribution for k steps and in model-based cases, we solve a joint optimization problem of higher dimension for a tree-based model. Our method can work on general tasks with high/low-dimensional states, discrete/continuous actions, and sparse/dense rewards. Empirical evaluations show that Farsighter outperforms SOTA explorations on a wide range of Atari games, robotic manipulation tasks, and general RL tasks.