Feature Dynamic Bayesian Networks

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Dec 25, 2008 - AI] 25 Dec 2008. Feature Dynamic Bayesian Networks. Marcus Hutter. RSISE @ ANU and SML @ NICTA. Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia.

Feature Dynamic Bayesian Networks Marcus Hutter

arXiv:0812.4581v1 [cs.AI] 25 Dec 2008

RSISE @ ANU and SML @ NICTA Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia [email protected] www.hutter1.net

24 December 2008 Abstract

Feature MDPs [Hut09]. Concrete real-world problems can often be modeled as MDPs. For this purpose, a designer extracts relevant features from the history (e.g. position and velocity of all objects), i.e. the history ht = a1 o1 r1 ...at−1 ot−1 rt−1 ot is summarized by a feature vector st := Φ(ht ). The feature vectors are regarded as states of an MDP and are assumed to be (approximately) Markov. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) [GP07] is concerned with designing agents that perform well in a very large range of environments [LH07], including all of the mentioned ones above and more. In this general situation, it is not a priori clear what the useful features are. Indeed, any observation in the (far) past may be relevant in the future. A solution suggested in [Hut09] is to learn Φ itself. If Φ keeps too much of the history (e.g. Φ(ht ) = ht ), the resulting MDP is too large (infinite) and cannot be learned. If Φ keeps too little, the resulting state sequence is not Markov. The Cost criterion I develop formalizes this tradeoff and is minimized for the “best” Φ. At any time n, the best Φ is the one that minimizes the Markov code length of s1 ...sn and r1 ...rn . This reminds but is actually quite different from MDL, which minimizes model+data code length [Gr¨ u07].

Feature Markov Decision Processes (ΦMDPs) [Hut09] are well-suited for learning agents in general environments. Nevertheless, unstructured (Φ)MDPs are limited to relatively simple environments. Structured MDPs like Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) are used for large-scale realworld problems. In this article I extend ΦMDP to ΦDBN. The primary contribution is to derive a cost criterion that allows to automatically extract the most relevant features from the environment, leading to the “best” DBN representation. I discuss all building blocks required for a complete general learning algorithm. Keywords: Reinforcement learning; dynamic Bayesian network; structure learning; feature learning; global vs. local reward; explore-exploit.



Agents. The agent-environment setup in which an Agent interacts with an Environment is a very general and prevalent framework for studying intelligent learning systems [RN03]. In cycles t = 1,2,3,..., the environment provides a (regular) observation ot ∈ O (e.g. a camera image) to the agent; then the agent chooses an action at ∈ A (e.g. a limb movement); finally the environment provides a realvalued reward rt ∈IR to the agent. The reward may be very scarce, e.g. just +1 (-1) for winning (losing) a chess game, and 0 at all other times [Hut05, Sec.6.3]. Then the next cycle t+1 starts. The agent’s objective is to maximize his reward.

Dynamic Bayesian networks. The use of “unstructured” MDPs [Hut09], even our Φ-optimal ones, is clearly limited to relatively simple tasks. Real-world problems are structured and can often be represented by dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) with a reasonable number of nodes [DK89]. Bayesian networks in general and DBNs in particular are powerful tools for modeling and solving complex real-world problems. Advances in theory and Environments. For example, sequence prediction is con- increase in computation power constantly broaden their cerned with environments that do not react to the agents range of applicability [BDH99, SDL07]. actions (e.g. a weather-forecasting “action”) [Hut03], plan- Main contribution. The primary contribution of this ning deals with the case where the environmental function work is to extend the Φ selection principle developed in is known [RPPCd08], classification and regression is for [Hut09] for MDPs to the conceptually much more demandconditionally independent observations [Bis06], Markov ing DBN case. The major extra complications are approxDecision Processes (MDPs) assume that ot and rt only imating, learning and coding the rewards, the dependence depend on at−1 and ot−1 [SB98], POMDPs deal with Par- of the Cost criterion on the DBN structure, learning the tially Observable MDPs [KLC98], and Dynamic Bayesian DBN structure, and how to store and find the optimal Networks (DBNs) with structured MDPs [BDH99]. value function and policy. 1

Although this article is self-contained, it is recom- The idea is that Φ shall extract the “relevant” aspects mended to read [Hut09] first. of the history in the sense that “compressed” history sar1:n ≡ s1 a1 r1 ...sn an rn can well be described as a sample 2 Feature Dynamic Bayesian Networks from some MDP (S,A,T,R) = (state space, action space, (ΦDBN) transition probability, reward function). (Φ) Dynamic Bayesian Networks are structured (Φ)MDPs. The state space is S = {0,1}m, and each state s ≡ x ≡ (x1 ,...,xm ) ∈ S is interpreted as a feature vector x = Φ(h), where xi = Φi (h) is the value of the ith binary feature. In the following I will also refer to xi as feature i, although strictly speaking it is its value. Since nonbinary features can be realized as a list of binary features, I restrict myself to the latter. Given xt−1 = x, I assume that the features (x1t ,...,xm t )= ′ x at time t are independent, and that each x′i depends only on a subset of “parent” features ui ⊆ {x1 ,...,xm }, i.e. the transition matrix has the structure m Y a ′ Pa (x′i |ui ) (1) Txx′ = P(xt = x |xt−1 = x, at−1 = a) =

In this section I recapitulate the definition of ΦMDP from [Hut09], and adapt it to DBNs. While formally a DBN is just a special case of an MDP, exploiting the additional structure efficiently is a challenge. For generic MDPs, typical algorithms should be polynomial and can at best be linear in the number of states |S|. For DBNs we want algorithms that are polynomial in the number of features m. Such DBNs have exponentially many states (2O(m) ), hence the standard MDP algorithms are exponential, not polynomial, in m. Deriving poly-time (and poly-space!) algorithms for DBNs by exploiting the additional DBN structure is the challenge. The gain is that we can handle exponentially large structured MDPs efficiently. Notation. Throughout this article, log denotes the binary logarithm, and δx,y = δxy = 1 if x = y and 0 else is the Kronecker symbol. I generally omit separating commas if no confusion arises, in particular in indices. For any z of suitable type (string,vector,set), I define S string P z = z1:l = z1 ...zl , sum z+ = j zj , union z∗ = j zj , and vector z • = (z1 ,...,zl ), where j ranges over the full range {1,...,l} and l = |z| is the length or dimension or size of z. zˆ denotes an estimate of z. The characteristic function 11B = 1 if B=true and 0 else. P(·) denotes a probability over states and rewards or parts thereof. I do not distinguish between random variables Z and realizations z, and abbreviation P(z) := P[Z = z] never leads to confusion. More specifically, m ∈ IN denotes the number of features, i ∈ {1,...,m} any feature, n ∈ IN the current time, and t ∈ {1,...,n} any time. Further, in order not to get distracted at several places I gloss over initial conditions or special cases where inessential. Also 0∗undefined=0∗infinity:=0.


This defines our ΦDBN model. It is just a ΦMDP with special S and T . Explaining ΦDBN on an example is easier than staying general.


ΦDBN Example

Consider an instantiation of the simple vacuum world [RN03, Sec.3.6]. There are two rooms, A and B, and a vacuum Robot that can observe whether the room he is in is Clean or Dirty; M ove to the other room, Suck, i.e. clean the room he is in; or do N othing. After 3 days a room gets dirty again. Every clean room gives a reward 1, but a moving or sucking robot costs and hence reduces the reward by 1. Hence O={A,B}×{C,D}, A={N,S,M }, R = {−1,0,1,2}, and the dynamics Env() (possible histories) is clear from the above description.

Dynamics as a DBN. We can model the dynamics by a DBN as follows: The state is modeled by 3 features. Feature R ∈ {A,B} stores in which room the robot is, and ΦMDP definition. A ΦMDP consists of a 7 tufeature A/B ∈{0,1,2,3} remembers (capped at 3) how long pel (O,A,R,Agent,Env,Φ,S) = (observation space, action ago the robot has cleaned room A/B last time, hence S = space, reward space, agent, environment, feature map, {0,1,2,3}×{A,B}×{0,1,2,3}. The state/feature transition state space). Without much loss of generality, I assume is as follows: that A and O are finite and R ⊆ IR. Implicitly I assume A to be small, while O may be huge. if (xR= A and a = S) then x′A= 0 else x′A= min{xA+1, 3}; Agent and Env are a pair or triple of interlocking func- if (xR= B and a = S) then x′B = 0 else x′B = min{xB+1, 3}; tions of the history H := (O×A×R)∗ ×O: if a = M (if xR= B then x′R= A else x′R= B) else x′R= xR ; Env : H × A × R ; O, on = Env(hn−1 an−1 rn−1 ), A DBN can be viewed as a two-layer Bayesian network Agent : H ; A, an = Agent(hn ), [BDH99]. The dependency structure of our example is Env : H × A ; R, rn = Env(hn an ). depicted in the right diagram. t t−1 Each feature consists of a (left,right)-  where ; indicates that mappings → might be stochasA - A′ tic. The informal goal of AI is to design an Agent() that pair of nodes, and a node i ∈ {1,2,3 =  >   b on the right is connected to   achieves high (expected) reward over the agent’s lifetime m}={A,R,B}  i all and only the parent features u on the R in a large range of Env()ironments. R′   Z left. The reward is The feature map Φ maps histories to states  Z ~ Z B B′ r = 11xA

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