The act of remembering: A study in partially observable reinforcement learning
Authors: Rodrigo Toro Icarte, Richard Valenzano, Toryn Q. Klassen, Phillip Christoffersen, Amir-massoud Farahmand, Sheila A. McIlraith
Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Partial Observability, Memory Representations, External Memories, POMDPs.
Abstract: Partial observability remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). In fully observable environments it is sufficient for RL agents to learn memoryless policies. However, some form of memory is necessary when RL agents are faced with partial observability. In this paper we study a lightweight approach: we augment the environment with an external memory and additional actions to control what, if anything, is written to the memory. At every step, the current memory state is part of the agent’s observation, and the agent selects a tuple of actions: one action that modifies the environment and another that modifies the memory. When the external memory is sufficiently expressive, optimal memoryless policies yield globally optimal solutions. We develop the theory for memory-augmented environments and formalize the RL problem. Previous attempts to use external memory in the form of binary memory have produced poor results in practice. We propose and experimentally evaluate alternative forms of k-size buffer memory where the agent can decide to remember observations by pushing (or not) them into the buffer. Our memories are simple to implement and outperform binary and LSTM-based memories in well-established partially observable domains.