Learning a good history representation is one of the core challenges of reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. Recent works have shown the advantages of various auxiliary tasks for facilitating representation learning. However, the effectiveness of such auxiliary tasks has not been fully convincing, especially in partially observable environments that require long-term memorization and inference. In this empirical study, we investigate the effectiveness of future prediction for learning the representations of histories, possibly of extensive length, in partially observable environments. We first introduce an approach that decouples the task of learning history representations from policy optimization via future prediction. Then, our main contributions are two-fold: (a) we demonstrate that the performance of reinforcement learning is strongly correlated with the prediction accuracy of future observations in partially observable environments, and (b) our approach can significantly improve the overall end-to-end approach by preventing high-variance noisy signals from reinforcement learning objectives to influence the representation learning. We illustrate our claims on three types of benchmarks that necessitate the ability to process long histories for high returns.

在部分可观察环境中，学习历史表征是强化学习的核心挑战之一。本文通过未来预测的方式探究了历史表征学习的有效性，并证明了强化学习的性能与未来观察的预测准确性密切相关。同时，该方法可以阻止高方差嘈杂信号对表征学习的影响，显著改善整体端到端方法。通过在需要处理长时间历史的三类基准测试中验证了我们的观点。

未来预测能成为部分可观察环境中良好历史表达的有力证据