RL in Latent MDPs is Tractable: Online Guarantees via Off-Policy Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kwon, Jeongyeol, Mannor, Shie, Caramanis, Constantine, Efroni, Yonathan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Kwon, Jeongyeol
Mannor, Shie
Caramanis, Constantine
Efroni, Yonathan
author_facet Kwon, Jeongyeol
Mannor, Shie
Caramanis, Constantine
Efroni, Yonathan
contents In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent variable is selected at the beginning of an interaction and is not disclosed to the agent. In the last decade, there has been significant progress in solving LMDPs under different structural assumptions. However, for general LMDPs, there is no known learning algorithm that provably matches the existing lower bound (Kwon et al., 2021). We introduce the first sample-efficient algorithm for LMDPs without any additional structural assumptions. Our result builds off a new perspective on the role of off-policy evaluation guarantees and coverage coefficients in LMDPs, a perspective, that has been overlooked in the context of exploration in partially observed environments. Specifically, we establish a novel off-policy evaluation lemma and introduce a new coverage coefficient for LMDPs. Then, we show how these can be used to derive near-optimal guarantees of an optimistic exploration algorithm. These results, we believe, can be valuable for a wide range of interactive learning problems beyond LMDPs, and especially, for partially observed environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_01389
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RL in Latent MDPs is Tractable: Online Guarantees via Off-Policy Evaluation
Kwon, Jeongyeol
Mannor, Shie
Caramanis, Constantine
Efroni, Yonathan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent variable is selected at the beginning of an interaction and is not disclosed to the agent. In the last decade, there has been significant progress in solving LMDPs under different structural assumptions. However, for general LMDPs, there is no known learning algorithm that provably matches the existing lower bound (Kwon et al., 2021). We introduce the first sample-efficient algorithm for LMDPs without any additional structural assumptions. Our result builds off a new perspective on the role of off-policy evaluation guarantees and coverage coefficients in LMDPs, a perspective, that has been overlooked in the context of exploration in partially observed environments. Specifically, we establish a novel off-policy evaluation lemma and introduce a new coverage coefficient for LMDPs. Then, we show how these can be used to derive near-optimal guarantees of an optimistic exploration algorithm. These results, we believe, can be valuable for a wide range of interactive learning problems beyond LMDPs, and especially, for partially observed environments.
title RL in Latent MDPs is Tractable: Online Guarantees via Off-Policy Evaluation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01389