How to Explore with Belief: State Entropy Maximization in POMDPs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zamboni, Riccardo, Cirino, Duilio, Restelli, Marcello, Mutti, Mirco
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Zamboni, Riccardo
Cirino, Duilio
Restelli, Marcello
Mutti, Mirco
author_facet Zamboni, Riccardo
Cirino, Duilio
Restelli, Marcello
Mutti, Mirco
contents Recent works have studied *state entropy maximization* in reinforcement learning, in which the agent's objective is to learn a policy inducing high entropy over states visitation (Hazan et al., 2019). They typically assume full observability of the state of the system, so that the entropy of the observations is maximized. In practice, the agent may only get *partial* observations, e.g., a robot perceiving the state of a physical space through proximity sensors and cameras. A significant mismatch between the entropy over observations and true states of the system can arise in those settings. In this paper, we address the problem of entropy maximization over the *true states* with a decision policy conditioned on partial observations *only*. The latter is a generalization of POMDPs, which is intractable in general. We develop a memory and computationally efficient *policy gradient* method to address a first-order relaxation of the objective defined on *belief* states, providing various formal characterizations of approximation gaps, the optimization landscape, and the *hallucination* problem. This paper aims to generalize state entropy maximization to more realistic domains that meet the challenges of applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_02295
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How to Explore with Belief: State Entropy Maximization in POMDPs
Zamboni, Riccardo
Cirino, Duilio
Restelli, Marcello
Mutti, Mirco
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent works have studied *state entropy maximization* in reinforcement learning, in which the agent's objective is to learn a policy inducing high entropy over states visitation (Hazan et al., 2019). They typically assume full observability of the state of the system, so that the entropy of the observations is maximized. In practice, the agent may only get *partial* observations, e.g., a robot perceiving the state of a physical space through proximity sensors and cameras. A significant mismatch between the entropy over observations and true states of the system can arise in those settings. In this paper, we address the problem of entropy maximization over the *true states* with a decision policy conditioned on partial observations *only*. The latter is a generalization of POMDPs, which is intractable in general. We develop a memory and computationally efficient *policy gradient* method to address a first-order relaxation of the objective defined on *belief* states, providing various formal characterizations of approximation gaps, the optimization landscape, and the *hallucination* problem. This paper aims to generalize state entropy maximization to more realistic domains that meet the challenges of applications.
title How to Explore with Belief: State Entropy Maximization in POMDPs
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02295