Exploration in relational domains for model-based reinforcement learning
The Journal of Machine Learning Research
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Agents (humans, mice, computers) need to constantly make decisions to survive and thrive in their environment. In the reinforcement-learning problem, an agent needs to learn to maximize its long-term expected reward through direct interaction with the world. To achieve this goal, the agent needs to build some sort of internal representation of the relationship between its actions, the state of the world and the reward it expects to obtain. In this work, I show how the way in which the agent represents state and models the world plays a key role in its ability to learn effectively. I will introduce a new representation, based on objects and their interactions, and show how it enables several orders of magnitude faster learning on a large class of problems. I claim that this representation is a natural way of modeling state and that it bridges a gap between generality and tractability in a broad and interesting class of domains, namely those of relational nature. I will present a set of learning algorithms that make use of this representation in both deterministic and stochastic environments, and present polynomial bounds that prove their efficiency in terms of learning complexity.