Online Learning and Planning in Partially Observable Domains without Prior Knowledge

How an agent can act optimally in stochastic, partially observable domains is a challenge problem, the standard approach to address this issue is to learn the domain model firstly and then based on the learned model to find the (near) optimal policy. However, offline learning the model often needs to store the entire training data and cannot utilize the data generated in the planning phase. Furthermore, current research usually assumes the learned model is accurate or presupposes knowledge of the nature of the unobservable part of the world. In this paper, for systems with discrete settings, with the benefits of Predictive State Representations~(PSRs), a model-based planning approach is proposed where the learning and planning phases can both be executed online and no prior knowledge of the underlying system is required. Experimental results show compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, our algorithm achieved a high level of performance with no prior knowledge provided, along with theoretical advantages of PSRs. Source code is available at https://github.com/DMU-XMU/PSR-MCTS-Online.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1904.0300

Tensor Decomposition for Multi-agent Predictive State Representation

Predictive state representation~(PSR) uses a vector of action-observation sequence to represent the system dynamics and subsequently predicts the probability of future events. It is a concise knowledge representation that is well studied in a single-agent planning problem domain. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing work on using PSR to solve multi-agent planning problems. Learning a multi-agent PSR model is quite difficult especially with the increasing number of agents, not to mention the complexity of a problem domain. In this paper, we resort to tensor techniques to tackle the challenging task of multi-agent PSR model development problems. By first focusing on a two-agent setting, we construct the system dynamics matrix as a high order tensor for a PSR model, learn the prediction parameters and deduce state vectors directly through two different tensor decomposition methods respectively, and derive the transition parameters via linear regression. Subsequently, we generalize the PSR learning approaches in a multi-agent setting. Experimental results show that our methods can effectively solve multi-agent PSR modelling problems in multiple problem domains.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figure