Title
Efficient Empowerment.
Abstract
Empowerment quantifies the influence an agent has on its environment. This is formally achieved by the maximum of the expected KL-divergence between the distribution of the successor state conditioned on a specific action and a distribution where the actions are marginalised out. This is a natural candidate for an intrinsic reward signal in the context of reinforcement learning: the agent will place itself in a situation where its action have maximum stability and maximum influence on the future. The limiting factor so far has been the computational complexity of the method: the only way of calculation has so far been a brute force algorithm, reducing the applicability of the method to environments with a small set discrete states. In this work, we propose to use an efficient approximation for marginalising out the actions in the case of continuous environments. This allows fast evaluation of empowerment, paving the way towards challenging environments such as real world robotics. The method is presented on a pendulum swing up problem.
Year
Venue
DocType
2015
CoRR
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1509.08455
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Maximilian Karl192.40
Justin Bayer215732.38
Patrick van der Smagt318824.23