  Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in generalizing over raw
sensory data using only a single neural network for value optimization. There
are several challenges in the current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning
algorithms that prevent them from converging towards the global optima. It is
likely that the solution to these problems lies in short- and long-term
planning, exploration and memory management for reinforcement learning
algorithms. Games are often used to benchmark reinforcement learning algorithms
as they provide a flexible, reproducible, and easy to control environment.
Regardless, few games feature a state-space where results in exploration,
memory, and planning are easily perceived. This paper presents The Dreaming
Variational Autoencoder (DVAE), a neural network based generative modeling
architecture for exploration in environments with sparse feedback. We further
present Deep Maze, a novel and flexible maze engine that challenges DVAE in
partial and fully-observable state-spaces, long-horizon tasks, and
deterministic and stochastic problems. We show initial findings and encourage
further work in reinforcement learning driven by generative exploration.
