Papers › Variational Recurrent Models for Solving Partially Observable Control Tasks

Variational Recurrent Models for Solving Partially Observable Control Tasks

23 Dec 2019ICLR 2020 1arXiv:1912.10703archive 2025-07-28

Dongqi Han, Kenji Doya, Jun Tani

In partially observable (PO) environments, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often suffer from unsatisfactory performance, since two problems need to be tackled together: how to extract information from the raw observations to solve the task, and how to improve the policy. In this study, we propose an RL algorithm for solving PO tasks. Our method comprises two parts: a variational recurrent model (VRM) for modeling the environment, and an RL controller that has access to both the environment and the VRM. The proposed algorithm was tested in two types of PO robotic control tasks, those in which either coordinates or velocities were not observable and those that require long-term memorization. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieved better data efficiency and/or learned more optimal policy than other alternative approaches in tasks in which unobserved states cannot be inferred from raw observations in a simple manner.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

oist-cnru/Variational-Recurrent-Models officialmentioned in paperpytorchMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Deep Reinforcement LearningMemorizationReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections