Exploiting Exogenous Structure for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wan, Jia, Sinclair, Sean R., Shah, Devavrat, Wainwright, Martin J.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Wan, Jia
Sinclair, Sean R.
Shah, Devavrat
Wainwright, Martin J.
author_facet Wan, Jia
Sinclair, Sean R.
Shah, Devavrat
Wainwright, Martin J.
contents We study Exo-MDPs, a structured class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the state space is partitioned into exogenous and endogenous components. Exogenous states evolve stochastically, independent of the agent's actions, while endogenous states evolve deterministically based on both state components and actions. Exo-MDPs are useful for applications including inventory control, portfolio management, and ride-sharing. Our first result is structural, establishing a representational equivalence between the classes of discrete MDPs, Exo-MDPs, and discrete linear mixture MDPs. Specifically, any discrete MDP can be represented as an Exo-MDP, and the transition and reward dynamics can be written as linear functions of the exogenous state distribution, showing that Exo-MDPs are instances of linear mixture MDPs. For unobserved exogenous states, we prove a regret upper bound of $O(H^{3/2}d\sqrt{K})$ over $K$ trajectories of horizon $H$, with $d$ as the size of the exogenous state space, and establish nearly-matching lower bounds. Our findings demonstrate how Exo-MDPs decouple sample complexity from action and endogenous state sizes, and we validate our theoretical insights with experiments on inventory control.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploiting Exogenous Structure for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Wan, Jia
Sinclair, Sean R.
Shah, Devavrat
Wainwright, Martin J.
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
We study Exo-MDPs, a structured class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the state space is partitioned into exogenous and endogenous components. Exogenous states evolve stochastically, independent of the agent's actions, while endogenous states evolve deterministically based on both state components and actions. Exo-MDPs are useful for applications including inventory control, portfolio management, and ride-sharing. Our first result is structural, establishing a representational equivalence between the classes of discrete MDPs, Exo-MDPs, and discrete linear mixture MDPs. Specifically, any discrete MDP can be represented as an Exo-MDP, and the transition and reward dynamics can be written as linear functions of the exogenous state distribution, showing that Exo-MDPs are instances of linear mixture MDPs. For unobserved exogenous states, we prove a regret upper bound of $O(H^{3/2}d\sqrt{K})$ over $K$ trajectories of horizon $H$, with $d$ as the size of the exogenous state space, and establish nearly-matching lower bounds. Our findings demonstrate how Exo-MDPs decouple sample complexity from action and endogenous state sizes, and we validate our theoretical insights with experiments on inventory control.
title Exploiting Exogenous Structure for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14557