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Proto Successor Measure: Representing the Behavior Space of an RL Agent.
Siddhant Agarwal, Harshit Sikchi, Peter
Stone, and Amy Zhang.
In International Conference on Machine Learning, June 2025.
Having explored an environment, intelligent agents should be able to transfertheir knowledge to most downstream tasks within that environment withoutadditional interactions. Referred to as "zero-shot learning", this abilityremains elusive for general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithms. Whilerecent works have attempted to produce zero-shot RL agents, they make assumptionsabout the nature of the tasks or the structure of the MDP. We present ProtoSuccessor Measure: the basis set for all possible behaviors of a ReinforcementLearning Agent in a dynamical system. We prove that any possible behavior(represented using visitation distributions) can be represented using an affinecombination of these policy-independent basis functions. Given a reward functionat test time, we simply need to find the right set of linear weights to combinethese bases corresponding to the optimal policy. We derive a practical algorithmto learn these basis functions using reward-free interaction data from theenvironment and show that our approach can produce the near-optimal policy attest time for any given reward function without additional environmentalinteractions.
@InProceedings{siddhant_agarwal_psm,
author = {Siddhant Agarwal and Harshit Sikchi and Peter Stone and Amy Zhang},
title = {Proto Successor Measure: Representing the Behavior Space of an RL Agent},
booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
year = {2025},
month = {June},
location = {Vancouver, Canada},
abstract = {Having explored an environment, intelligent agents should be able to transfer
their knowledge to most downstream tasks within that environment without
additional interactions. Referred to as "zero-shot learning", this ability
remains elusive for general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithms. While
recent works have attempted to produce zero-shot RL agents, they make assumptions
about the nature of the tasks or the structure of the MDP. We present Proto
Successor Measure: the basis set for all possible behaviors of a Reinforcement
Learning Agent in a dynamical system. We prove that any possible behavior
(represented using visitation distributions) can be represented using an affine
combination of these policy-independent basis functions. Given a reward function
at test time, we simply need to find the right set of linear weights to combine
these bases corresponding to the optimal policy. We derive a practical algorithm
to learn these basis functions using reward-free interaction data from the
environment and show that our approach can produce the near-optimal policy at
test time for any given reward function without additional environmental
interactions.
},
}
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