Adaptive Representations for Reinforcement Learning

丛 书 名：Studies in Computational Intelligence

版本说明：2011

作     者：Shimon Whiteson 

I S B N：(纸本) 9783642139314 

出 版 社：Springer Berlin Heidelberg 

出 版 年：2010年

学科分类：12[管理学] 1201[管理学-管理科学与工程(可授管理学、工学学位)] 081104[工学-模式识别与智能系统] 08[工学] 0835[工学-软件工程] 0811[工学-控制科学与工程] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

摘      要：This book presents new algorithms for reinforcement learning, a form of machine learning in which an autonomous agent seeks a control policy for a sequential decision task. Since current methods typically rely on manually designed solution representations, agents that automatically adapt their own representations have the potential to dramatically improve performance. This book introduces two novel approaches for automatically discovering high-performing representations. The first approach synthesizes temporal difference methods, the traditional approach to reinforcement learning, with evolutionary methods, which can learn representations for a broad class of optimization problems. This synthesis is accomplished by customizing evolutionary methods to the on-line nature of reinforcement learning and using them to evolve representations for value function approximators. The second approach automatically learns representations based on piecewise-constant approximations of value functions. It begins with coarse representations and gradually refines them during learning, analyzing the current policy and value function to deduce the best refinements. This book also introduces a novel method for devising input representations. This method addresses the feature selection problem by extending an algorithm that evolves the topology and weights of neural networks such that it evolves their inputs too. In addition to introducing these new methods, this book presents extensive empirical results in multiple domains demonstrating that these techniques can substantially improve performance over methods with manual representations.