{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/partial-observability-during-drl-for-robot","title":"Experimental Study on The Effect of Multi-step Deep Reinforcement Learning in POMDPs","arxiv_id":"2209.04999","date":"2022-09-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lingheng Meng","Rob Gorbet","Michael Burke","Dana Kulić"],"abstract":"Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has made tremendous advances in both simulated and real-world robot control tasks in recent years. This is particularly the case for tasks that can be carefully engineered with a full state representation, and which can then be formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, applying DRL strategies designed for MDPs to novel robot control tasks can be challenging, because the available observations may be a partial representation of the state, resulting in a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). This paper considers three popular DRL algorithms, namely Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3), and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), invented for MDPs, and studies their performance in POMDP scenarios. While prior work has found that SAC and TD3 typically outperform PPO across a broad range of tasks that can be represented as MDPs, we show that this is not always the case, using three representative POMDP environments. Empirical studies show that this is related to multi-step bootstrapping, where multi-step immediate rewards, instead of one-step immediate reward, are used to calculate the target value estimation of an observation and action pair. We identify this by observing that the inclusion of multi-step bootstrapping in TD3 (MTD3) and SAC (MSAC) results in improved robustness in POMDP settings.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04999v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.04999v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"partial-observability-during-drl-for-robot","repo_url":"https://github.com/linghengmeng/m_rl_pomdp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"clipped-double-q-learning","method_name":"Clipped Double Q-learning"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dilated-convolution","method_name":"Dilated Convolution"},{"method_slug":"entropy-regularization","method_name":"Entropy Regularization"},{"method_slug":"experience-replay","method_name":"Experience Replay"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"ppo","method_name":"PPO"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"sac","method_name":"SAC"},{"method_slug":"td3","method_name":"TD3"},{"method_slug":"target-policy-smoothing","method_name":"Target Policy Smoothing"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}