Title
Expected Eligibility Traces
Abstract
The question of how to determine which states and actions are responsible for a certain outcome is known as the credit assignment problem and remains a central research question in reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence. Eligibility traces enable efficient credit assignment to the recent sequence of states and actions experienced by the agent, but not to counterfactual sequences that could also have led to the current state. In this work, we introduce expected eligibility traces. Expected traces allow, with a single update, to update states and actions that could have preceded the current state, even if they did not do so on this occasion. We discuss when expected traces provide benefits over classic (instantaneous) traces in temporal-difference learning, and show that some-times substantial improvements can be attained. We provide a way to smoothly interpolate between instantaneous and expected traces by a mechanism similar to bootstrapping, which ensures that the resulting algorithm is a strict generalisation of TD(A). Finally, we discuss possible extensions and connections to related ideas, such as successor features.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
THIRTY-FIFTH AAAI CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, THIRTY-THIRD CONFERENCE ON INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE ELEVENTH SYMPOSIUM ON EDUCATIONAL ADVANCES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
35
2159-5399
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
hado van hasselt143231.39
Sephora Madjiheurem200.34
Matteo Hessel313310.65
David Silver48252363.86
André Barreto5125.65
diana borsa6115.00