  Learning-based Adaptive Bit Rate~(ABR) method, aiming to learn outstanding
strategies without any presumptions, has become one of the research hotspots
for adaptive streaming. However, it typically suffers from several issues,
i.e., low sample efficiency and lack of awareness of the video quality
information. In this paper, we propose Comyco, a video quality-aware ABR
approach that enormously improves the learning-based methods by tackling the
above issues. Comyco trains the policy via imitating expert trajectories given
by the instant solver, which can not only avoid redundant exploration but also
make better use of the collected samples. Meanwhile, Comyco attempts to pick
the chunk with higher perceptual video qualities rather than video bitrates. To
achieve this, we construct Comyco's neural network architecture, video datasets
and QoE metrics with video quality features. Using trace-driven and real-world
experiments, we demonstrate significant improvements of Comyco's sample
efficiency in comparison to prior work, with 1700x improvements in terms of the
number of samples required and 16x improvements on training time required.
Moreover, results illustrate that Comyco outperforms previously proposed
methods, with the improvements on average QoE of 7.5% - 16.79%. Especially,
Comyco also surpasses state-of-the-art approach Pensieve by 7.37% on average
video quality under the same rebuffering time.
