Abstract
Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), in which agents learn to make a sequence of decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system, that is, they act under partial observability of the states, are ubiquitous. Partially observable RL can be notoriously difficult—well-known information-theoretic results show that learning partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) requires an exponential number of samples in the worst case. Yet, this does not rule out the existence of large subclasses of POMDPs over which learning is tractable. In this paper we identify such a subclass, which we call weakly revealing POMDPs. This family rules out the pathological instances of POMDPs where observations are uninformative to a degree that makes learning hard. We prove that for weakly revealing POMDPs, a simple algorithm combining optimism and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is sufficient to guarantee polynomial sample complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably sample-efficient result for learning from interactions in overcomplete POMDPs, where the number of latent states can be larger than the number of observations.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 5175-5220 |
Number of pages | 46 |
Journal | Proceedings of Machine Learning Research |
Volume | 178 |
State | Published - 2022 |
Event | 35th Conference on Learning Theory, COLT 2022 - London, United Kingdom Duration: Jul 2 2022 → Jul 5 2022 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Artificial Intelligence
- Software
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Statistics and Probability