Policy Tree Network

Zac Wellmer, Sepanta Zeighami, James Kwok

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Decision-time planning policies with implicit dynamics models have been shown to work in discrete action spaces with Q learning. However, decision-time planning with implicit dynamics models in continuous action space has proven to be a difficult problem. Recent work in Reinforcement Learning has allowed for implicit model based approaches to be extended to Policy Gradient methods. In this work we propose Policy Tree Network (PTN). Policy Tree Network lies at the intersection of Model-Based Reinforcement Learning and Model-Free Reinforcement Learning. Policy Tree Network is a novel approach which, for the first time, demonstrates how to leverage an implicit model to perform decision-time planning with Policy Gradient methods in continuous action spaces. This work is empirically justified on 8 standard MuJoCo environments so that it can easily be compared with similar work done in this area. Additionally, we offer a lower bound on the worst case change in the mean of the policy when tree planning is used and theoretically justify our design choices.