Papers › Adaptive Discretization for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Adaptive Discretization for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

1 Jul 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2007.00717archive 2025-07-28

Sean R. Sinclair, Tianyu Wang, Gauri Jain, Siddhartha Banerjee, Christina Lee Yu

We introduce the technique of adaptive discretization to design an efficient model-based episodic reinforcement learning algorithm in large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on optimistic one-step value iteration extended to maintain an adaptive discretization of the space. From a theoretical perspective we provide worst-case regret bounds for our algorithm which are competitive compared to the state-of-the-art model-based algorithms. Moreover, our bounds are obtained via a modular proof technique which can potentially extend to incorporate additional structure on the problem. From an implementation standpoint, our algorithm has much lower storage and computational requirements due to maintaining a more efficient partition of the state and action spaces. We illustrate this via experiments on several canonical control problems, which shows that our algorithm empirically performs significantly better than fixed discretization in terms of both faster convergence and lower memory usage. Interestingly, we observe empirically that while fixed-discretization model-based algorithms vastly outperform their model-free counterparts, the two achieve comparable performance with adaptive discretization.

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Model-based Reinforcement Learning Reinforcement Learning Reinforcement Learning (RL)model reinforcement-learning

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