No abstract

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is the state-of-the-art online planning algorithm for large problems with discrete action spaces. However, many real-world problems involve continuous action spaces, where MCTS is not as effective as in discrete action spaces. This is mainly due to common practices such as coarse discretization of the entire action space and failure to exploit local smoothness. In this paper, we introduce Value-Gradient UCT (VG-UCT), which combines traditional MCTS with gradient-based optimization of action particles. VG-UCT simultaneously performs a global search via UCT with respect to the finitely sampled set of actions and performs a local improvement via action value gradients. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing MCTS methods and other strong baseline algorithms for continuous action spaces.

We consider a Bayesian approach to model-based reinforcement learning, where the agent uses a distribution of environment models to find the action that optimally trades off exploration and exploitation. Unfortunately, it is intractable to find the Bayes-optimal solution to the problem except for restricted cases. In this paper, we present BOKLE, a simple algorithm that uses Kullback-Leibler divergence to constrain the set of plausible models for guiding the exploration. We provide a formal analysis that this algorithm is near Bayes-optimal with high probability. We also show an asymptotic relation between the solution pursued by BOKLE and a well-known algorithm called Bayesian exploration bonus. Finally, we show experimental results that clearly demonstrate the exploration efficiency of the algorithm.

No abstract