How Should I Plan? A Performance Comparison of Decision-Time vs. Background Planning

Safa Alver, Doina Precup

Keywords: Reinforcement learning, model-based reinforcement learning, dynamic programming, transfer learning

TL;DR: Understanding under what conditions and which settings decision-time planning will perform better than background planning and vice versa.

Abstract: In model-based reinforcement learning, an agent can leverage a learned model to improve its way of behaving in different ways. Two prevalent approaches are decision-time planning and background planning. In this study, we are interested in understanding under what conditions and in which settings one of these two planning styles will perform better than the other in domains that require fast responses. After viewing them through the lens of dynamic programming, we first consider the classical instantiations of these planning styles and provide theoretical results and hypotheses on which one will perform better in the pure planning, planning & learning, and transfer learning settings. We then consider the modern instantiations of these planning styles and provide hypotheses on which one will perform better in the last two of the considered settings. Lastly, we perform several illustrative experiments to empirically validate both our theoretical results and hypotheses. Overall, our findings suggest that even though decision-time planning does not perform as well as background planning in their classical instantiations, in their modern instantiations, it can perform on par or better than background planning in both the planning & learning and transfer learning settings.

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Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: Reinforcement Learning (eg, decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)