Planning by Prioritized Sweeping with Small Backups
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Efficient planning plays a crucial role in model-based reinforcement learning. Traditionally, the main planning operation is a full backup based on the current estimates of the successor states. Consequently, its computation time is proportional to the number of successor states. In this paper, we introduce a new planning backup that uses only the current value of a single successor state and has a computation time independent of the number of successor states. This new backup, which we call a small backup, opens the door to a new class of model-based reinforcement learning methods that exhibit much finer control over their planning process than traditional methods. We empirically demonstrate that this increased flexibility allows for more efficient planning by showing that an implementation of prioritized sweeping based on small backups achieves a substantial performance improvement over classical implementations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it