Graph Sparse Sampling: Breaking the Curse of the Horizon in Continuous MDP Planning
Planning under uncertainty in continuous domains is essential for autonomous systems, yet computationally demanding. Tree-based search methods such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) remain popular, but their branching structure can require sampling budgets that grow exponentially with lookahead depth in the worst case. From a tree perspective, continuous state or action spaces become especially challenging, since the planner must decide where to search in an infinite branching hierarchy. We propose Graph Sparse Sampling (GSS), an online planning algorithm that shares sampled futures across many candidate decisions, rather than sampling separate successors for each candidate action. This branch-free graph exposes large GPU-friendly batches, while using heuristics to focus computation. We prove finite-sample performance guarantees for GSS covering full-rank or low-rank generative simulators via smoothed backups, and discrete or sampled continuous action spaces. Under suitable overlap, regularity, and action-coverage conditions, these bounds have polynomial dependence on the planning horizon, formalizing when shared futures can avoid the exponential horizon dependence of tree-shaped sparse sampling. We demonstrate continuous-control simulations where GSS substantially outperforms tree-based planners on long horizons or achieves near-optimal performance, supporting no-branching graph planning as a complementary design principle for online control.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Breaking the Curse of Horizon: Infinite-Horizon Off-Policy Estimation
We consider the off-policy estimation problem of estimating the expected reward of a target policy using samples collected by a different behavior policy. Importance sampling (IS) has been a key technique to derive (near…
Breaking the Curse with BAND: Nonparametric Distribution Estimation in High Dimensions
Minimax-optimal rates for multivariate distribution estimation are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We propose a sparse Bayesian network approach in which each conditional probability is estimated using …
Black-box Off-policy Estimation for Infinite-Horizon Reinforcement Learning
Off-policy estimation for long-horizon problems is important in many real-life applications such as healthcare and robotics, where high-fidelity simulators may not be available and on-policy evaluation is expensive or im…
reinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Breaking the Martingale Curse: Multi-Agent Debate via Asymmetric Cognitive Potential Energy
Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing large language model reasoning. However, recent work reveals a limitation:standard MAD cannot improve belief correctness beyond majority voting; …
Breaking the curse of dimensionality in structured density estimation
We consider the problem of estimating a structured multivariate density, subject to Markov conditions implied by an undirected graph. In the worst case, without Markovian assumptions, this problem suffers from the curse …
Density Estimation