把强化学习规划看作对策略的贝叶斯推断,更自然地优化目标。
MDP Planning as Policy Inference
- 将策略视为隐变量,用期望回报构建后验分布。
- 在网格世界等环境中表现优于熵正则化方法。
- 适合研究强化学习理论与推理框架的学者。
我们将回合制马尔可夫决策过程(MDP)规划建模为策略上的贝叶斯推断。核心贡献是概念性的:策略本身作为隐变量,期望回报定义了策略上的非归一化后验密度。该方法保留了标准期望回报目标,区别于引入辅助最优性变量的轨迹中心型推断方法,也不同于解决不同目标的熵正则化策略优化。在精确形式下,确定性策略的后验诱导出一种在偏好不确定性下的最优随机策略。针对具有随机转移的离散MDP,我们采用变分序列蒙特卡洛(VSMC)近似该后验,引入状态重访时的策略一致性及粒子间耦合的转移随机性。在网格世界、黑杰克、三角轮胎世界和学术咨询任务上的实验评估了策略推断的影响,并与熵正则化策略优化进行比较。结果支持将MDP规划自然地视为对策略的贝叶斯推断。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We formulate episodic Markov decision process (MDP) planning as Bayesian inference over policies. The primary contribution is conceptual: the policy itself is treated as the latent variable, and expected return defines an unnormalized posterior density over policies. This preserves the standard expected-return objective, in contrast to trajectory-centric planning-as-inference formulations that introduce auxiliary optimality variables and to entropy-regularized policy optimization methods that solve a different objective. In the exact formulation, the posterior over deterministic policies induces what we define here as an optimal stochastic policy under preference uncertainty, namely the stochastic policy induced by that posterior. For discrete MDPs with stochastic transitions, we study variational sequential Monte Carlo (VSMC) as one approximate inference method for this posterior, introducing policy consistency under state revisitation and coupled transition randomness across particles. Experiments on grid worlds, Blackjack, Triangle Tireworld, and Academic Advising examine the consequences of inference over policies and compare its induced behavior with entropy-regularized policy optimization. The results support the view that MDP planning can be naturally cast as Bayesian inference over policies.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。