Temporally extended features in model-based reinforcement learning with partial observability

Partial observability poses a major challenge for a reinforcement learning agent since the complete history of observations may be relevant for predicting and acting optimally. This is especially true in the general case where the underlying state space and dynamics are unknown. Existing approaches either try to learn a latent state representation or use decision trees based on the history of observations. In this paper we present a method for explicitly identifying relevant features of the observation history. These temporally extended features can be discovered using our Pulse algorithm and used to learn a compact model of the environment. Temporally extended features reveal the temporal structure of the environment while empirically outperforming other history-based approaches. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.