I am playing with pymdptoolbox. It has a built-in problem of forest management. It can generate a transition matrix P
and R
by specifying a state value for forest function (default value is 3). The implementation of Q-Learning
, PolicyIteration
and ValueIteration
to find the optimal policy is straightforward. However by creating a slightly more complicated problem by changing the state to a bit larger value than 4 (from 5 onwards), only PI
and VI
return the same policy while QL
cannot find the optimal policy. This is very surprising and puzzling. Can anyone help me understand why is this for QL
in this package?
By looking at the raw code of QL
(using epsilon-greedy), it seems it ties the probability with iteration number, i.e. prob = 1 - (1/log(n+2))
and the learning rate is (1/math.sqrt(n+2)
). Is there any specific reason why tying probability/learning rate to the iteration number, instead of making them independent variables (the code itself can be modified easily though).
I think my biggest puzzle is to understand why QL
fails to find the policy for a vanilla problem. Thanks.
from mdptoolbox.mdp import ValueIteration, QLearning, PolicyIteration
from mdptoolbox.example import forest
Gamma = 0.99
states = [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 30, 50, 70, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000]
compare_VI_QI_policy = [] # True or False
compare_VI_PI_policy = []
for state in states:
P, R = forest(state)
VI = ValueIteration(P, R, Gamma)
PI = PolicyIteration(P, R, Gamma)
QL = QLearning(P, R, Gamma)
## run VI
VI.run()
# run PI
PI.run()
# run QL
QL.run()
compare_VI_QI_policy.append(QL.policy == VI.policy)
compare_VI_PI_policy.append(VI.policy == PI.policy)
print compare_VI_QI_policy
print compare_VI_PI_policy