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arXiv · 1505.00322

Using PCA to Efficiently Represent State Spaces

William Curran·Tim Brys·Matthew Taylor·William Smart
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Abstract

Reinforcement learning algorithms need to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces. This is known as the curse of dimensionality. By projecting the agent's state onto a low-dimensional manifold, we can represent the state space in a smaller and more efficient representation. By using this representation during learning, the agent can converge to a good policy much faster. We test this approach in the Mario Benchmarking Domain. When using dimensionality reduction in Mario, learning converges much faster to a good policy. But, there is a critical convergence-performance trade-off. By projecting onto a low-dimensional manifold, we are ignoring important data. In this paper, we explore this trade-off of convergence and performance. We find that learning in as few as 4 dimensions (instead of 9), we can improve performance past learning in the full dimensional space at a faster convergence rate.

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William Curran, Tim Brys, Matthew Taylor, William Smart. 2015-05-02. Using PCA to Efficiently Represent State Spaces. https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00322

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