Research Publications

This paper describes a computationally feasible approximation to the AIXI agent, a universal reinforcement learning agent for arbitrary environments. AIXI is scaled down in two key ways: First, the class of environment models is restricted to all prediction suffix trees of a fixed maximum depth. This allows a Bayesian mixture of environment models to be computed in time proportional to the logarithm of the size of the model class. Secondly, the finite-horizon expectimax search is approximated by an asymptotically convergent Monte Carlo Tree Search technique. This scaled down AIXI agent is empirically shown to be effective on a wide class of toy problem domains, ranging from simple fully observable games to small POMDPs. We explore the limits of this approximate agent and propose a general heuristic framework for scaling this technique to much larger problems.