World Programs for Model-Based Learning and Planning in Compositional State and Action Spaces

Abstract: Some of the most important tasks take place in environments which lack cheap and perfect simulators, thus hampering the application of model-free reinforcement learning (RL). While model-based RL aims to learn a dynamics model, in a more general case the learner does not know a priori what the action space is. Here we propose a formalism where the learner induces a world program by learning a dynamics model and the actions in graph-based compositional environments by observing state-state transition examples. Then, the learner can perform RL with the world program as the simulator for complex planning tasks. We highlight a recent application, and propose a challenge for the community to assess world program-based planning.