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Blazing the trails before beating the path: Sample-efficient Monte-Carlo planning
Jean-Bastien Grill · Michal Valko · Remi Munos

Tue Dec 06 09:00 AM -- 12:30 PM (PST) @ Area 5+6+7+8 #193
in Tuesday Posters »

We study the sampling-based planning problem in Markov decision processes (MDPs) that we can access only through a generative model, usually referred to as Monte-Carlo planning. Our objective is to return a good estimate of the optimal value function at any state while minimizing the number of calls to the generative model, i.e. the sample complexity. We propose a new algorithm, TrailBlazer, able to handle MDPs with a finite or an infinite number of transitions from state-action to next states. TrailBlazer is an adaptive algorithm that exploits possible structures of the MDP by exploring only a subset of states reachable by following near-optimal policies. We provide bounds on its sample complexity that depend on a measure of the quantity of near-optimal states. The algorithm behavior can be considered as an extension of Monte-Carlo sampling (for estimating an expectation) to problems that alternate maximization (over actions) and expectation (over next states). Finally, another appealing feature of TrailBlazer is that it is simple to implement and computationally efficient.

Keywords: Online Learning
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Author Information

Jean-Bastien Grill (Inria Lille - Nord Europe)
Michal Valko (Inria Lille - Nord Europe)
Michal Valko

Michal is a machine learning scientist in DeepMind Paris, tenured researcher at Inria, and the lecturer of the master course Graphs in Machine Learning at l'ENS Paris-Saclay. Michal is primarily interested in designing algorithms that would require as little human supervision as possible. This means 1) reducing the “intelligence” that humans need to input into the system and 2) minimizing the data that humans need to spend inspecting, classifying, or “tuning” the algorithms. That is why he is working on methods and settings that are able to deal with minimal feedback, such as deep reinforcement learning, bandit algorithms, or self-supervised learning. Michal is actively working on represenation learning and building worlds models. He is also working on deep (reinforcement) learning algorithm that have some theoretical underpinning. He has also worked on sequential algorithms with structured decisions where exploiting the structure leads to provably faster learning. He received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Pittsburgh under the supervision of Miloš Hauskrecht and after was a postdoc of Rémi Munos before taking a permanent position at Inria in 2012.

Remi Munos (Google DeepMind)

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