AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper
On Shallow Planning Under Partial Observability
- Randy Lefebvre
- Audrey Durand
Formulating a real-world problem under the Reinforcement Learning framework involves non-trivial design choices, such as selecting a discount factor for the learning objective (dis- counted cumulative rewards), which articulates the planning horizon of the agent. This work investigates the impact of the discount factor on the bias-variance trade-off given structural parameters of the underlying Markov Decision Process. Our results support the idea that a shorter planning horizon might be beneficial, especially under partial observability.