English

Reinforcement Learning in Non-Markovian Environments

Systems and Control 2024-02-15 v4 Machine Learning Systems and Control

Abstract

Motivated by the novel paradigm developed by Van Roy and coauthors for reinforcement learning in arbitrary non-Markovian environments, we propose a related formulation and explicitly pin down the error caused by non-Markovianity of observations when the Q-learning algorithm is applied on this formulation. Based on this observation, we propose that the criterion for agent design should be to seek good approximations for certain conditional laws. Inspired by classical stochastic control, we show that our problem reduces to that of recursive computation of approximate sufficient statistics. This leads to an autoencoder-based scheme for agent design which is then numerically tested on partially observed reinforcement learning environments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.01595,
  title  = {Reinforcement Learning in Non-Markovian Environments},
  author = {Siddharth Chandak and Pratik Shah and Vivek S Borkar and Parth Dodhia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.01595},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

19 pages, accepted for publication at Systems and Control Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-28T05:04:34.318Z