---
title: "Active Policy Iteration: Efficient Exploration through Active Learning for Value Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning"
authors:
  - "Takayuki Akiyama"
  - "Hirotaka Hachiya"
  - "Masashi Sugiyama"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/166"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/0166.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2009
pages: ""
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Active Policy Iteration: Efficient Exploration through Active Learning for Value Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning

Takayuki Akiyama, Hirotaka Hachiya, Masashi Sugiyama

*Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*.

## Abstract

Appropriately designing sampling policies is highly important for obtaining better control policies in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we first show that the least-squares policy iteration (LSPI) framework allows us to employ statistical active learning methods for linear regression. Then we propose a design method of good sampling policies for efficient exploration, which is particularly useful when the sampling cost of immediate rewards is high. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method, named active policy iteration (API), through simulations with a batting robot.