Generalized Prioritized Sweeping

D. Andre, N. Friedman, and R. Parr

To appear, NIPS 1997.

A preliminary version appears in Reinforcment Learning Workshop at the Fourteenth International Conference on Machine Learning. 1997.

Postscript version (120K) PDF version.


Abstract

Prioritized sweeping is a model-based reinforcement learning method that attempt to focus the agent's limited computational resources to achieve a good estimate of the value of environment states. The classic account of prioritized sweeping uses an explicit, state-based representation of the value, reward, and model parameters. Such a representation is unwieldy for dealing with complex environments and there is growing interest in learning with more compact representations. We claim that classic prioritized sweeping is ill-suited for learning with such representations. To overcome this deficiency, we introduce generalized prioritized sweeping, a principled method for generating representation-specific algorithms for model-based reinforcement learning. We then apply this method for several representations, including state-based models and generalized model approximators (such as Bayesian networks). We describe preliminary experiments that compare our approach with classical prioritized sweeping.


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