Exploring the Stratified Space Structure of an RL Game with the Volume Growth Transform

Abstract

In this work, we explore the structure of the embedding space of a transformer model trained for playing a particular reinforcement learning (RL) game. Specifically, we investigate how a transformer-based Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) model embeds visual inputs in a simple environment where an agent must collect "coins" while avoiding dynamic obstacles consisting of "spotlights." By adapting Robinson et al.'s study of the volume growth transform for LLMs to the RL setting, we find that the token embedding space for our visual coin collecting game is also not a manifold, and is better modeled as a stratified space, where local dimension can vary from point to point. We further strengthen Robinson's method by proving that fairly general volume growth curves can be realized by stratified spaces. Finally, we carry out an analysis that suggests that as an RL agent acts, its latent representation alternates between periods of low local dimension, while following a fixed sub-strategy, and bursts of high local dimension, where the agent achieves a sub-goal (e.g., collecting an object) or where the environmental complexity increases (e.g., more obstacles appear). Consequently, our work suggests that the distribution of dimensions in a stratified latent space may provide a new geometric indicator of complexity for RL games.