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Title: Variational Recurrent Models for Solving Partially Observable Control Tasks

Paper content:
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.
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been developed to solve difficult control and decision-making tasks by self-exploration (Sutton & Barto, 1998; Mnih et al., 2015; Silver et al., 2016) .
While various kinds of fully observable environments have been well investigated, recently, partially observable (PO) environments (Hafner et al., 2018; Igl et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2019; Jaderberg et al., 2019) have commanded greater attention, since real-world applications often need to tackle incomplete information and a non-trivial solution is highly desirable.
There are many types of PO tasks; however, those that can be solved by taking the history of observations into account are more common.
These tasks are often encountered in real life, such as videos games that require memorization of previous events (Kapturowski et al., 2018; Jaderberg et al., 2019) and robotic control using real-time images as input (Hafner et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2019) .
While humans are good at solving these tasks by extracting crucial information from the past observations, deep RL agents often have difficulty acquiring satisfactory policy and achieving good data efficiency, compared to those in fully observable tasks (Hafner et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2019) .
For solving such PO tasks, several categories of methods have been proposed.
One simple, straightforward solution is to include a history of raw observations in the current "observation" (McCallum, 1993; Lee et al., 2019) .
Unfortunately, this method can be impractical when decision-making requires a long-term memory because dimension of observation become unacceptably large if a long history is included.
Another category is based on model-free RL methods with recurrent neural networks (RNN) as function approximators (Schmidhuber, 1990; 1991; Igl et al., 2018; Kapturowski et al., 2018; Jaderberg et al., 2019) , which is usually more tractable to implement.
In this case, RNNs need to tackle two problems simultaneously (Lee et al., 2019) : learning representation (encoded by hidden states of the RNN) of the underlying states of the environment from the state-transition data, and learning to maximize returns using the learned representation.
As most RL algorithms use a bootstrapping strategy to learn the expected return and to improve the policy (Sutton & Barto, 1998) , it is challenging to train the RNN stably and efficiently, since RNNs are relatively more difficult to train (Pascanu et al., 2013) than feedforward neural networks.
The third category considers learning a model of the environment and estimating a belief state, extracted from a sequence of state-transitions (Kaelbling et al., 1998; Ha & Schmidhuber, 2018; Lee et al., 2019) .
The belief state is an agent-estimated variable encoding underlying states of the environment that determines state-transitions and rewards.
Perfectly-estimated belief states can thus be taken as "observations" of an RL agent that contains complete information for solving the task.
Therefore, solving a PO task is segregated into a representation learning problem and a fully observable RL problem.
Since fully observable RL problems have been well explored by the RL community, the critical challenge here is how to estimate the belief state.
In this study, we developed a variational recurrent model (VRM) that models sequential observations and rewards using a latent stochastic variable.
The VRM is an extension of the variational recurrent neural network (VRNN) model (Chung et al., 2015) that takes actions into account.
Our approach falls into the third category by taking the internal states of the VRM together with raw observations as the belief state.
We then propose an algorithm to solve PO tasks by training the VRM and a feed-forward RL controller network, respectively.
The algorithm can be applied in an end-to-end manner, without fine tuning of a hyperparameters.
We then experimentally evaluated the proposed algorithm in various PO versions of robotic control tasks.
The agents showed substantial policy improvement in all tasks, and in some tasks the algorithm performed essentially as in fully observable cases.
In particular, our algorithm demonstrates greater performance compared to alternative approaches in environments where only velocity information is observable or in which long-term memorization is needed.
In this paper, we proposed a variational recurrent model for learning to represent underlying states of PO environments and the corresponding algorithm for solving POMDPs.
Our experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in tasks in which underlying states cannot be simply inferred using a short sequence of observations.
Our work can be considered an attempt to understand how RL benefits from stochastic Bayesian inference of state-transitions, which actually happens in the brain (Funamizu et al., 2016) , but has been considered less often in RL studies.
We used stochastic models in this work which we actually found perform better than deterministic ones, even through the environments we used are deterministic (Appendix C).
The VRNN can be replaced with other alternatives (Bayer & Osendorfer, 2014; Goyal et al., 2017) to potentially improve performance, although developing model architecture is beyond the scope of the current study.
Moreover, a recent study (Ahmadi & Tani, 2019) showed a novel way of inference using back-propagation of prediction errors, which may also benefit our future studies.
Many researchers think that there are two distinct systems for model-based and model-free RL in the brain (Gläscher et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2014) and a number of studies investigated how and when the brain switches between them (Smittenaar et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2014) .
However, Stachenfeld et al. (2017) suggested that the hippocampus can learn a successor representation of the environment that benefits both model-free and model-based RL, contrary to the aforementioned conventional view.
We further propose another possibility, that a model is learned, but not used for planning or dreaming.
This blurs the distinction between model-based and model-free RL.
Tuomas Haarnoja, Aurick Zhou, Pieter Abbeel, and Sergey Levine.
Soft actor-critic: Off-policy maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning with a stochastic actor.
In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 1856-1865, 2018a.

assistant: text: A deep RL algorithm for solving POMDPs by auto-encoding the underlying states using a variational recurrent model