Influence-based abstraction in deep reinforcement learning

Real-world systems are typically extremely complex, consisting of thousands, or even millions of state variables. Unfortunately, applying reinforcement learning algorithms to handle complex tasks becomes more and more challenging as the number of state variables increases. In this paper, we build on the concept of influence-based abstraction which tries to tackle such scalability issues by decomposing large systems into small regions. We explore this method in the context of deep reinforcement learning, showing that by keeping track of a small set of variables in the history of previous actions and observations we can learn policies that can effectively control a local region in the global system.