Improving cognitive agent decision making: Experience trajectories as plans

Abstract

In task environments with large state and action spaces, the use of temporal and state abstraction can potentially improve the decision making performance of agents. However, existing approaches within a reinforcement learning framework typically identify possible subgoal states and instantly learn stochastic subpolicies to reach them from other states. In these circumstances, exploration of the reinforcement learner is unfavorably biased towards local behavior around these subgoals; temporal abstractions are not exploited to reduce required deliberation; and the benefit of employing temporal abstractions is conflated with the benefit of additional learning done to define subpolicies. In thi..