An Optical Pulse Stacking Environment and Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks

Deep reinforcement learning has the potential to address various scientific problems. In this paper, we implement an optics simulation environment for reinforcement learning based controllers. The environment incorporates nonconvex and nonlinear optical phenomena as well as more realistic time-dependent noise. Then we provide the benchmark results of several state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms in the proposed simulation environment. In the end, we discuss the difficulty of controlling the real-world optical environment with reinforcement learning algorithms. We will make the simulation environment and code publicly available.