Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 11 (NIPS 1998)
Mohammad Al-Ansari, Ronald Williams
Parti-game (Moore 1994a; Moore 1994b; Moore and Atkeson 1995) is a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has a lot of promise in over(cid:173) coming the curse of dimensionality that can plague RL algorithms when applied to high-dimensional problems. In this paper we introduce mod(cid:173) ifications to the algorithm that further improve its performance and ro(cid:173) bustness. In addition, while parti-game solutions can be improved locally by standard local path-improvement techniques, we introduce an add-on algorithm in the same spirit as parti-game that instead tries to improve solutions in a non-local manner.