High-Confidence Policy Optimization: Reshaping Ambiguity Sets in Robust MDPs

10/23/2019

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by   Bahram Behzadian, et al.

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Robust MDPs are a promising framework for computing robust policies in reinforcement learning. Ambiguity sets, which represent the plausible errors in transition probabilities, determine the trade-off between robustness and average-case performance. The standard practice of defining ambiguity sets using the L_1 norm leads, unfortunately, to loose and impractical guarantees. This paper describes new methods for optimizing the shape of ambiguity sets beyond the L_1 norm. We derive new high-confidence sampling bounds for weighted L_1 and weighted L_∞ ambiguity sets and describe how to compute near-optimal weights from rough value function estimates. Experimental results on a diverse set of benchmarks show that optimized ambiguity sets provide significantly tighter robustness guarantees.