Provably Efficient Maximum Entropy Exploration

Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov decision process (MDP) in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? One natural, intrinsically defined, objective problem is for the agent to learn a policy which induces a distribution over state space that is as uniform as possible, which can be measured in an entropic sense. Despite the corresponding mathematical program being non-convex, our main result provides a provably efficient method (both in terms of sample size and computational complexity) to construct such a maximum-entropy exploratory policy. Key to our algorithmic methodology is utilizing the conditional gradient method (a.k.a. the Frank-Wolfe algorithm) which utilizes an approximate MDP solver.