  Training task-completion dialogue agents with reinforcement learning usually
requires a large number of real user experiences. The Dyna-Q algorithm extends
Q-learning by integrating a world model, and thus can effectively boost
training efficiency using simulated experiences generated by the world model.
The effectiveness of Dyna-Q, however, depends on the quality of the world model
- or implicitly, the pre-specified ratio of real vs. simulated experiences used
for Q-learning. To this end, we extend the recently proposed Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ)
framework by integrating a switcher that automatically determines whether to
use a real or simulated experience for Q-learning. Furthermore, we explore the
use of active learning for improving sample efficiency, by encouraging the
world model to generate simulated experiences in the state-action space where
the agent has not (fully) explored. Our results show that by combining switcher
and active learning, the new framework named as Switch-based Active Deep Dyna-Q
(Switch-DDQ), leads to significant improvement over DDQ and Q-learning
baselines in both simulation and human evaluations.
