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Title: Harnessing Structures for Value-Based Planning and Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
Value-based methods constitute a fundamental methodology in planning and deep reinforcement learning (RL).
In this paper, we propose to exploit the underlying structures of the state-action value function, i.e., Q function, for both planning and deep RL.
In particular, if the underlying system dynamics lead to some global structures of the Q function, one should be capable of inferring the function better by leveraging such structures.
Specifically, we investigate the low-rank structure, which widely exists for big data matrices.
We verify empirically the existence of low-rank Q functions in the context of control and deep RL tasks (Atari games).
As our key contribution, by leveraging Matrix Estimation (ME) techniques, we propose a general framework to exploit the underlying low-rank structure in Q functions, leading to a more efficient planning procedure for classical control, and additionally, a simple scheme that can be applied to any value-based RL techniques to consistently achieve better performance on ''low-rank'' tasks.
Extensive experiments on control tasks and Atari games confirm the efficacy of our approach.
Value-based methods are widely used in control, planning and reinforcement learning (Gorodetsky et al., 2018; Alora et al., 2016; Mnih et al., 2015) .
To solve a Markov Decision Process (MDP), one common method is value iteration, which finds the optimal value function.
This process can be done by iteratively computing and updating the state-action value function, represented by Q(s, a) (i.e., the Q-value function).
In simple cases with small state and action spaces, value iteration can be ideal for efficient and accurate planning.
However, for modern MDPs, the data that encodes the value function usually lies in thousands or millions of dimensions (Gorodetsky et al., 2018; 2019) , including images in deep reinforcement learning (Mnih et al., 2015; Tassa et al., 2018) .
These practical constraints significantly hamper the efficiency and applicability of the vanilla value iteration.
Yet, the Q-value function is intrinsically induced by the underlying system dynamics.
These dynamics are likely to possess some structured forms in various settings, such as being governed by partial differential equations.
In addition, states and actions may also contain latent features (e.g., similar states could have similar optimal actions).
Thus, it is reasonable to expect the structured dynamic to impose a structure on the Q-value.
Since the Q function can be treated as a giant matrix, with rows as states and columns as actions, a structured Q function naturally translates to a structured Q matrix.
In this work, we explore the low-rank structures.
To check whether low-rank Q matrices are common, we examine the benchmark Atari games, as well as 4 classical stochastic control tasks.
As we demonstrate in Sections 3 and 4, more than 40 out of 57 Atari games and all 4 control tasks exhibit low-rank Q matrices.
This leads us to a natural question: How do we leverage the low-rank structure in Q matrices to allow value-based techniques to achieve better performance on "low-rank" tasks?
We propose a generic framework that allows for exploiting the low-rank structure in both classical planning and modern deep RL.
Our scheme leverages Matrix Estimation (ME), a theoretically guaranteed framework for recovering low-rank matrices from noisy or incomplete measurements (Chen & Chi, 2018) .
In particular, for classical control tasks, we propose Structured Value-based Planning (SVP).
For the Q matrix of dimension |S| × |A|, at each value iteration, SVP randomly updates a small portion of the Q(s, a) and employs ME to reconstruct the remaining elements.
We show that planning problems can greatly benefit from such a scheme, where much fewer samples (only sample around 20% of (s, a) pairs at each iteration) can achieve almost the same policy as the optimal one.
For more advanced deep RL tasks, we extend our intuition and propose Structured Value-based Deep RL (SV-RL), applicable for any value-based methods such as DQN (Mnih et al., 2015) .
Here, instead of the full Q matrix, SV-RL naturally focuses on the "sub-matrix", corresponding to the sampled batch of states at the current iteration.
For each sampled Q matrix, we again apply ME to represent the deep Q learning target in a structured way, which poses a low rank regularization on this "sub-matrix" throughout the training process, and hence eventually the Q-network's predictions.
Intuitively, as learning a deep RL policy is often noisy with high variance, if the task possesses a low-rank property, this scheme will give a clear guidance on the learning space during training, after which a better policy can be anticipated.
We confirm that SV-RL indeed can improve the performance of various value-based methods on "low-rank" Atari games: SV-RL consistently achieves higher scores on those games.
Interestingly, for complex, "high-rank" games, SV-RL performs comparably.
ME naturally seeks solutions that balance low rank and a small reconstruction error (cf. Section 3.1).
Such a balance on reconstruction error helps to maintain or only slightly degrade the performance for "high-rank" situation.
We summarize our contributions as follows:
• We are the first to propose a framework that leverages matrix estimation as a general scheme to exploit the low-rank structures, from planning to deep reinforcement learning.
• We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on classical stochastic control tasks, where the low-rank structure allows for efficient planning with less computation.
• We extend our scheme to deep RL, which is naturally applicable for any value-based techniques.
Across a variety of methods, such as DQN, double DQN, and dueling DQN, experimental results on all Atari games show that SV-RL can consistently improve the performance of value-based methods, achieving higher scores for tasks when low-rank structures are confirmed to exist.
We investigated the structures in value function, and proposed a complete framework to understand, validate, and leverage such structures in various tasks, from planning to deep reinforcement learning.
The proposed SVP and SV-RL algorithms harness the strong low-rank structures in the Q function, showing consistent benefits for both planning tasks and value-based deep reinforcement learning techniques.
Extensive experiments validated the significance of the proposed schemes, which can be easily embedded into existing planning and RL frameworks for further improvements.
randomly sample a set Ω of observed entries from S × A, each with probability p 4: / * update the randomly selected state-action pairs * / 5:
end for 8:
/ * reconstruct the Q matrix via matrix estimation * / 9:
apply matrix completion to the observed values {Q(s, a)} (s,a)∈Ω to reconstruct Q (t+1) :

assistant: text: We propose a generic framework that allows for exploiting the low-rank structure in both planning and deep reinforcement learning.