Modifying the Parti-game Algorithm for Increased Robustness, Higher Eeciency and Better Policies

Parti-game (Moore 1994a; Moore 1994b; Moore and Atkeson 1995) is a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has a lot of promise in overcoming the curse of dimensionality (Bellman 1957) that can plague RL algorithms when applied to high-dimensional problems. In this paper we introduce modiications to the algorithm that further improve its performance and robustness. 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.