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Poster

Provably efficient RL with Rich Observations via Latent State Decoding

Simon Du · Akshay Krishnamurthy · Nan Jiang · Alekh Agarwal · Miroslav Dudik · John Langford

Pacific Ballroom #208

Keywords: [ Statistical Learning Theory ] [ Theory and Algorithms ]


Abstract: We study the exploration problem in episodic MDPs with rich observations generated from a small number of latent states. Under certain identifiability assumptions, we demonstrate how to estimate a mapping from the observations to latent states inductively through a sequence of regression and clustering steps---where previously decoded latent states provide labels for later regression problems---and use it to construct good exploration policies. We provide finite-sample guarantees on the quality of the learned state decoding function and exploration policies, and complement our theory with an empirical evaluation on a class of hard exploration problems. Our method exponentially improves over $Q$-learning with na\"ive exploration, even when $Q$-learning has cheating access to latent states.

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