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Poster

Operator World Models for Reinforcement Learning

Pietro Novelli · Marco Pratticò · Massimiliano Pontil · Carlo Ciliberto

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Thu 12 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a powerful and theoretically sound methodology for sequential decision-making. However, it is not directly applicable to Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to the inaccessibility of explicit action-value functions. We address this challenge by introducing a novel approach based on learning a world model of the environment using conditional mean embeddings (CME). We then leverage the operatorial formulation of RL to express the action-value function in terms of this quantity in closed form via matrix operations. Combining these estimators with PMD leads to POWR, a new RL algorithm for which we prove convergence rates to the global optimum. Preliminary experiments in both finite and infinite state settings support the effectiveness of our method, making this the first concrete implementation of PMD in RL to our knowledge.

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