Many important real-world problems have action spaces that are high-dimensional, continuous or both, making full enumeration of all possible actions infeasible. Instead, only small subsets of actions can be sampled for the purpose of policy evaluatio
n and improvement. In this paper, we propose a general framework to reason in a principled way about policy evaluation and improvement over such sampled action subsets. This sample-based policy iteration framework can in principle be applied to any reinforcement learning algorithm based upon policy iteration. Concretely, we propose Sampled MuZero, an extension of the MuZero algorithm that is able to learn in domains with arbitrarily complex action spaces by planning over sampled actions. We demonstrate this approach on the classical board game of Go and on two continuous control benchmark domains: DeepMind Control Suite and Real-World RL Suite.
Learning efficiently from small amounts of data has long been the focus of model-based reinforcement learning, both for the online case when interacting with the environment and the offline case when learning from a fixed dataset. However, to date no
single unified algorithm could demonstrate state-of-the-art results in both settings. In this work, we describe the Reanalyse algorithm which uses model-based policy and value improvement operators to compute new improved training targets on existing data points, allowing efficient learning for data budgets varying by several orders of magnitude. We further show that Reanalyse can also be used to learn entirely from demonstrations without any environment interactions, as in the case of offline Reinforcement Learning (offline RL). Combining Reanalyse with the MuZero algorithm, we introduce MuZero Unplugged, a single unified algorithm for any data budget, including offline RL. In contrast to previous work, our algorithm does not require any special adaptations for the off-policy or offline RL settings. MuZero Unplugged sets new state-of-the-art results in the RL Unplugged offline RL benchmark as well as in the online RL benchmark of Atari in the standard 200 million frame setting.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a powerful inductive bias for modelling algorithmic reasoning procedures and data structures. Their prowess was mainly demonstrated on tasks featuring Markovian dynamics, where querying any associated data structure d
epends only on its latest state. For many tasks of interest, however, it may be highly beneficial to support efficient data structure queries dependent on previous states. This requires tracking the data structures evolution through time, placing significant pressure on the GNNs latent representations. We introduce Persistent Message Passing (PMP), a mechanism which endows GNNs with capability of querying past state by explicitly persisting it: rather than overwriting node representations, it creates new nodes whenever required. PMP generalises out-of-distribution to more than 2x larger test inputs on dynamic temporal range queries, significantly outperforming GNNs which overwrite states.
