Unsupervised Representation Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Review
Nicolò Botteghi, Mannes Poel, Christoph Brüne · IEEE Control Systems · 2025
This review article addresses the problem of learning abstract representations of measurement data in the context of deep reinforcement learning. 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 1) improving the data efficiency, robustness, and generalization of DRL methods; 2) tackling the curse of dimensionality; and 3) 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 DL 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.