Direct Advantage Estimation in Partially Observable Environments

23 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: POMDP, advantage function, deep RL, off-policy learning
Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) was recently shown to improve sample-efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, DAE assumes full observability of the environment, which may be restrictive in realistic settings. In the present work, we first show that DAE can be extended to partially observable domains with minor modifications. Secondly, we address the increased computational cost due to the need to approximate the transition probabilities through the use of discrete latent dynamics models. Finally, we empirically evaluate the proposed method using the Arcade Learning Environments, and show that it is scalable and sample-efficient.
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
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Submission Number: 2878
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