arXiv:2605.10816cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

提出新方法让智能体在依赖历史的任务中更高效地学习策略。

Policy Gradient Methods for Non-Markovian Reinforcement Learning

  • 用可递归更新的内部状态总结历史信息,联合优化状态和策略。
  • 在多个非马尔可夫任务上表现优于基于预测目标的方法。
  • 理论证明收敛性,适合需要记忆长序列的任务场景。

我们研究非马尔可夫决策过程(NMDPs)中的策略梯度方法,其中观测和奖励依赖于完整的交互历史。为处理这种依赖,智能体维护一个递归更新的内部状态,以紧凑方式总结过去观测和动作。与将状态动态视为固定或通过预测目标学习的方法不同,我们提出一种以奖励为中心的公式,联合优化状态动态和控制策略以最大化期望累积奖励。为此,我们考虑一类代理状态-马尔可夫(ASM)策略,包含状态动态和从状态映射到动作的策略。我们建立了适用于回合制和无限时域折扣情形的新型策略梯度定理,扩展了经典结果。基于此梯度表达,我们提出代理状态-马尔可夫策略梯度(ASMPG)算法,利用状态动态的递归结构实现高效优化。我们建立了有限时间及几乎必然收敛保证,并在一系列非马尔可夫任务上实证表明,相较于通过预测目标学习状态表示的基线方法,ASMPG表现更优。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal state that is recursively updated to provide a compact summary of past observations and actions. In contrast to approaches that treat the agent state dynamics as fixed or learn it via predictive objectives, we propose a reward-centric formulation that jointly optimizes the agent state dynamics and the control policy to maximize the expected cumulative reward. To this end, we consider a class of Agent State-Markov (ASM) policies, comprising an agent state dynamics and a control policy that maps the agent state to actions. We establish a novel policy gradient theorem for ASM policies, extending the classical policy gradient results from the Markovian setting to episodic and infinite-horizon discounted NMDPs. Building on this gradient expression, we propose the Agent State-Markov Policy Gradient (ASMPG) algorithm, which leverages the recursive structure of the agent state dynamics for efficient optimization. We establish finite-time and almost sure convergence guarantees, and empirically demonstrate that, on a range of non-Markovian tasks, ASMPG outperforms baselines that learn state representations via predictive objectives.

强化学习非马尔可夫策略梯度状态建模

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