# Reinforcement Learning in Configurable Continuous Environments

Alberto Maria Metelli, Emanuele Ghelfi, and Marcello Restelli

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019, 9-15 June 2019, Long Beach, California, USA, 2019. Acceptance rate: 773/3424 (22.6%)

Abstract
Configurable Markov Decision Processes (Conf-MDPs) have been recently introduced as an extension of the usual MDP model to account for the possibility of configuring the environment to improve the agent’s performance. Currently, there is still no suitable algorithm to solve the learning problem for real-world Conf-MDPs. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing a trust-region method, Relative Entropy Model Policy Search (REMPS), able to learn both the policy and the MDP configuration in continuous domains without requiring the knowledge of the true model of the environment. After introducing our approach and providing a finite-sample analysis, we empirically evaluate REMPS on both benchmark and realistic environments by comparing our results with those of the gradient methods.

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 @inproceedings{metelli2019reinforcement,
author = "Metelli, Alberto Maria and Ghelfi, Emanuele and Restelli, Marcello",
editor = "Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Salakhutdinov, Ruslan",
title = "Reinforcement Learning in Configurable Continuous Environments",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, {ICML} 2019, 9-15 June 2019, Long Beach, California, {USA}",
series = "Proceedings of Machine Learning Research",
volume = "97",
pages = "4546--4555",
publisher = "{PMLR}",
year = "2019",
url = "http://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/metelli19a.html"
}