Timing as an Action: Learning When to Observe and Act

Abstract

In standard reinforcement learning setups, the agent receives observations and performs actions at evenly spaced intervals. However, in many real-world settings, observations are expensive, forcing agents to commit to courses of action for designated periods of time. Consider that doctors, after each visit, typically set not only a treatment plan but also a follow-up date at which that plan might be revised. In this work, we formalize the setup of timing-as-an-action. Through theoretical analysis in the tabular setting, we show that while the choice of delay intervals could be naively folded in as part of a composite action, these actions have a special structure and handling them intelligently yields statistical advantages. Taking a model-based perspective, these gains owe to the fact that delay actions do not add any parameters to the underlying model. For model estimation, we provide provable sample-efficiency improvements, and our experiments demonstrate empirical improvements in both healthcare simulators and classical reinforcement learning environments.