Practical Open-Loop Optimistic Planning

Abstract: We consider the problem of online planning in a Markov Decision Process when given only access to a generative model, restricted to open-loop policies - i.e. sequences of actions - and under budget constraint. In this setting, the Open-Loop Optimistic Planning (OLOP) algorithm enjoys good theoretical guarantees but is overly conservative in practice, as we show in numerical experiments. We propose a modified version of the algorithm with tighter upper-confidence bounds, KLOLOP, that leads to better practical performances while retaining the sample complexity bound. Finally, we propose an efficient implementation that significantly improves the time complexity of both algorithms.