In plain words: An agent builds plans by imagining one next state at a time and choosing which to explore, instead of simulating every action before acting. This cut simulated steps by up to 96% while improving performance and generalizing better to new tasks.
Abstract
We introduce Dynamic Planning Networks (DPN), a novel architecture for deep reinforcement learning, that combines model-based and model-free aspects for online planning. Our architecture learns to dynamically construct plans using a learned state-transition model by selecting and traversing between simulated states and actions to maximize information before acting. In contrast to model-free methods, model-based planning lets the agent efficiently test action hypotheses without performing costly trial-and-error in the environment. DPN learns to efficiently form plans by expanding a single action-conditional state transition at a time instead of exhaustively evaluating each action, reducing the required number of state-transitions during planning by up to 96%. We observe various emergent planning patterns used to solve environments, including classical search methods such as breadth-first and depth-first search. DPN shows improved data efficiency, performance, and generalization to new and unseen domains in comparison to several baselines.
Norman Tasfi, Miriam Capretz
arXiv:1812.11240 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE, stat.ML · submitted Dec 28, 2018 · updated Feb 4, 2019
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