Recent developments in the field of model-based RL have proven successful in
a range of environments, especially ones where planning is essential. However,
such successes have been limited to deterministic fully-observed environments.
We present a new approach that handles stochastic and partially-observable
environments. Our key insight is to use discrete autoencoders to capture the
multiple possible effects of an action in a stochastic environment. We use a
stochastic variant of Monte Carlo tree search to plan over both the agent's
actions and the discrete latent variables representing the environment's
response. Our approach significantly outperforms an offline version of MuZero
on a stochastic interpretation of chess where the opponent is considered part
of the environment. We also show that our approach scales to DeepMind Lab, a
first-person 3D environment with large visual observations and partial
observability.
Authors
Sherjil Ozair, Yazhe Li, Ali Razavi, Ioannis Antonoglou, Aäron van den Oord, Oriol Vinyals