2019

A Geometric Perspective on Optimal Representations for Reinforcement Learning

Bellemare, Marc G., Dabney, Will, Dadashi, Robert et al.

Understand

We propose a new perspective on representation learning in reinforcement learning based on geometric properties of the space of value functions.

  • We leverage this perspective to provide formal evidence regarding the usefulness of value functions as auxiliary tasks.
  • Our formulation considers adapting the representation to minimize the (linear) approximation of the value function of all stationary policies for a given environment.
  • We show that this optimization reduces to making accurate predictions regarding a special class of value functions which we call adversarial value functions (AVFs).

Reading the bibliography…