Local Linearity: the Key for No-regret Reinforcement Learning in Continuous MDPs

Davide Maran, Alberto Maria Metelli, Matteo Papini, Marcello Restelli

Keywords: RL, regret, smoothness

TL;DR: We extend and improve several theoretical results about RL in continuous state-action spaces

Abstract:

Achieving the no-regret property for Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems in continuous state and action-space environments is one of the major open problems in the field. Existing solutions either work under very specific assumptions or achieve bounds that are vacuous in some regimes. Furthermore, many structural assumptions
are known to suffer from a provably unavoidable exponential dependence on the time horizon $H$ in the regret, which makes any possible solution unfeasible in practice.
In this paper, we identify _local linearity_ as the feature that makes Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) both _learnable_ (sublinear regret) and _feasible_ (regret that is polynomial in $H$).
We define a novel MDP representation class, namely _Locally Linearizable MDPs_, generalizing other representation classes like Linear MDPs and MDPS with low inherent Belmman error.
Then, i) we introduce **Cinderella**, a no-regret algorithm for this general representation class, and ii) we show that all known learnable and feasible MDP families are representable in this class.
We first show that all known feasible MDPs belong to a family that we call _Mildly Smooth MDPs_. Then, we show how any mildly smooth MDP can be represented as a Locally Linearizable MDP by an appropriate choice of representation. This way, **Cinderella** is shown to achieve state-of-the-art regret bounds for all previously known (and some new) continuous MDPs for which RL is learnable and feasible.

Primary Area: Reinforcement learning

Submission Number: 6814