Proper Laplacian Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gomez, Diego, Bowling, Michael, Machado, Marlos C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Gomez, Diego
Bowling, Michael
Machado, Marlos C.
author_facet Gomez, Diego
Bowling, Michael
Machado, Marlos C.
contents The ability to learn good representations of states is essential for solving large reinforcement learning problems, where exploration, generalization, and transfer are particularly challenging. The Laplacian representation is a promising approach to address these problems by inducing informative state encoding and intrinsic rewards for temporally-extended action discovery and reward shaping. To obtain the Laplacian representation one needs to compute the eigensystem of the graph Laplacian, which is often approximated through optimization objectives compatible with deep learning approaches. These approximations, however, depend on hyperparameters that are impossible to tune efficiently, converge to arbitrary rotations of the desired eigenvectors, and are unable to accurately recover the corresponding eigenvalues. In this paper we introduce a theoretically sound objective and corresponding optimization algorithm for approximating the Laplacian representation. Our approach naturally recovers both the true eigenvectors and eigenvalues while eliminating the hyperparameter dependence of previous approximations. We provide theoretical guarantees for our method and we show that those results translate empirically into robust learning across multiple environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_10833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Proper Laplacian Representation Learning
Gomez, Diego
Bowling, Michael
Machado, Marlos C.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The ability to learn good representations of states is essential for solving large reinforcement learning problems, where exploration, generalization, and transfer are particularly challenging. The Laplacian representation is a promising approach to address these problems by inducing informative state encoding and intrinsic rewards for temporally-extended action discovery and reward shaping. To obtain the Laplacian representation one needs to compute the eigensystem of the graph Laplacian, which is often approximated through optimization objectives compatible with deep learning approaches. These approximations, however, depend on hyperparameters that are impossible to tune efficiently, converge to arbitrary rotations of the desired eigenvectors, and are unable to accurately recover the corresponding eigenvalues. In this paper we introduce a theoretically sound objective and corresponding optimization algorithm for approximating the Laplacian representation. Our approach naturally recovers both the true eigenvectors and eigenvalues while eliminating the hyperparameter dependence of previous approximations. We provide theoretical guarantees for our method and we show that those results translate empirically into robust learning across multiple environments.
title Proper Laplacian Representation Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10833