A Multi-step Loss Function for Robust Learning of the Dynamics in
  Model-based Reinforcement Learning
Abdelhakim Benechehab Albert Thomas Giuseppe Paolo Maurizio Filippone Balázs Kégl
In model-based reinforcement learning, most algorithms rely on simulating
trajectories from one-step models of the dynamics learned on data. A critical
challenge of this approach is the compounding of one-step prediction errors as
the length of the trajectory grows. In this paper we tackle this issue by using
a multi-step objective to train one-step models. Our objective is a weighted
sum of the mean squared error (MSE) loss at various future horizons. We find
that this new loss is particularly useful when the data is noisy (additive
Gaussian noise in the observations), which is often the case in real-life
environments. To support the multi-step loss, first we study its properties in
two tractable cases: i) uni-dimensional linear system, and ii) two-parameter
non-linear system. Second, we show in a variety of tasks (environments or
datasets) that the models learned with this loss achieve a significant
improvement in terms of the averaged R2-score on future prediction horizons.
Finally, in the pure batch reinforcement learning setting, we demonstrate that
one-step models serve as strong baselines when dynamics are deterministic,
while multi-step models would be more advantageous in the presence of noise,
highlighting the potential of our approach in real-world applications.