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arXiv · 1811.03895

Performance Guarantees for Homomorphisms Beyond Markov Decision Processes

Sultan Javed Majeed·Marcus Hutter
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Abstract

Most real-world problems have huge state and/or action spaces. Therefore, a naive application of existing tabular solution methods is not tractable on such problems. Nonetheless, these solution methods are quite useful if an agent has access to a relatively small state-action space homomorphism of the true environment and near-optimal performance is guaranteed by the map. A plethora of research is focused on the case when the homomorphism is a Markovian representation of the underlying process. However, we show that near-optimal performance is sometimes guaranteed even if the homomorphism is non-Markovian. Moreover, we can aggregate significantly more states by lifting the Markovian requirement without compromising on performance. In this work, we expand Extreme State Aggregation (ESA) framework to joint state-action aggregations. We also lift the policy uniformity condition for aggregation in ESA that allows even coarser modeling of the true environment.

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Sultan Javed Majeed, Marcus Hutter. 2018-11-09. Performance Guarantees for Homomorphisms Beyond Markov Decision Processes. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03895

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