English

Budgeted Reinforcement Learning in Continuous State Space

Machine Learning 2019-05-29 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

A Budgeted Markov Decision Process (BMDP) is an extension of a Markov Decision Process to critical applications requiring safety constraints. It relies on a notion of risk implemented in the shape of a cost signal constrained to lie below an - adjustable - threshold. So far, BMDPs could only be solved in the case of finite state spaces with known dynamics. This work extends the state-of-the-art to continuous spaces environments and unknown dynamics. We show that the solution to a BMDP is a fixed point of a novel Budgeted Bellman Optimality operator. This observation allows us to introduce natural extensions of Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms to address large-scale BMDPs. We validate our approach on two simulated applications: spoken dialogue and autonomous driving.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.01004,
  title  = {Budgeted Reinforcement Learning in Continuous State Space},
  author = {Nicolas Carrara and Edouard Leurent and Romain Laroche and Tanguy Urvoy and Odalric-Ambrym Maillard and Olivier Pietquin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.01004},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

N. Carrara and E. Leurent have equally contributed

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:56:56.497Z