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You are in: Reinforcement Learning  /  FAQ  /  Nuts and Bolts of RL  /  My state and/or action space is huge! Can I still apply RL?
My state and/or action space is huge! Can I still apply RL?

Yes, but you can't get by with simple tables; you will need some kind of function approximation.

"Function approximation" refers to the use of a parameterized functional form to represent the value function (and/or the policy), as opposed to a simple table. A table is able to represent the value of each state separately, without confusion, interaction, or generalization with the value of any other state. In typical problems, however, there are far too many states to learn or represent their values individually; instead we have to generalize from observed to states to new, unobserved ones. In principle, this need not be a problem. There are a host of supervised learning methods that can used to approximate functions. However, there are both theoretical and practical pitfalls, and some care is needed. See Chapter 8 of the Sutton and Barto text.

For the most part, the theoretical foundation that RL adopts from dynamic programming is no longer valid in the case of function approximation. For example, Q-learning with linear function approximation is known to be unsound. The strongest positive result is for on-policy prediction with linear function approximators ( Tsitsiklis and Van Roy, 1997; Tadic, 2001). This is an area of active current research (e.g., see Gordon, 2001;Precup, Sutton & Dasgupta, 2001).






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