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VariBAD: A Very Good Method for Bayes-Adaptive Deep RL via Meta-Learning

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arxiv 1910.08348 v2 pith:AGO6S6VL submitted 2019-10-18 cs.LG stat.ML

VariBAD: A Very Good Method for Bayes-Adaptive Deep RL via Meta-Learning

classification cs.LG stat.ML
keywords environmentvaribaduncertaintybayes-adaptivebayes-optimaldeepduringexploration
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Trading off exploration and exploitation in an unknown environment is key to maximising expected return during learning. A Bayes-optimal policy, which does so optimally, conditions its actions not only on the environment state but on the agent's uncertainty about the environment. Computing a Bayes-optimal policy is however intractable for all but the smallest tasks. In this paper, we introduce variational Bayes-Adaptive Deep RL (variBAD), a way to meta-learn to perform approximate inference in an unknown environment, and incorporate task uncertainty directly during action selection. In a grid-world domain, we illustrate how variBAD performs structured online exploration as a function of task uncertainty. We further evaluate variBAD on MuJoCo domains widely used in meta-RL and show that it achieves higher online return than existing methods.

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