Value-Distributional Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Carlos E. Luis Alessandro G. Bottero Julia Vinogradska Felix Berkenkamp Jan Peters
Quantifying uncertainty about a policy's long-term performance is important
to solve sequential decision-making tasks. We study the problem from a
model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning perspective, where the goal is to
learn the posterior distribution over value functions induced by parameter
(epistemic) uncertainty of the Markov decision process. Previous work restricts
the analysis to a few moments of the distribution over values or imposes a
particular distribution shape, e.g., Gaussians. Inspired by distributional
reinforcement learning, we introduce a Bellman operator whose fixed-point is
the value distribution function. Based on our theory, we propose Epistemic
Quantile-Regression (EQR), a model-based algorithm that learns a value
distribution function that can be used for policy optimization. Evaluation
across several continuous-control tasks shows performance benefits with respect
to established model-based and model-free algorithms.