Learning What to Attend to

Abstract

We analyze the internal representations that deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents form of their environments and whether these representations correspond to what such agents should ideally learn. The purpose of this comparison is both a better understanding of why certain algorithms or network architectures perform better than others and the development of methods that specifically target discrepancies between what is and what should be learned. The concept of ideal representation we utilize is based on stochastic bisimulation and bisimulation metrics, which are measures of whether and to which degree states are behaviorally similar, respectively. Learning an internal representation in which states are equivalent if and only if they are bisimilar and in which distances between non-equivalent states are proportional to how behaviorally similar the states are has several desirable theoretical properties. Yet, we show empirically that the extent to which such a representation is learned in practice depends on several factors and that a precise such representation is not created in any case. We further provide experimental results that suggest that learning a representation that is close to this target internal state representation during training may improve upon the learning speed and consistency, and doing so by the end of training upon generalization.