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# Successor Representation

Dayan (1992) proposed an alternative formulation of the state value function $$V_{\pi}(s)$$ that enables rapidly adapting if reward probabilities or transition probabilities change. The idea is to separate the state value function into a product of rewards and future discounted state occupancies, which Dayan termed the successor representation (SR) and which I denote $$M$$. Then, if either the rewards or the transitions change, recomputing $$V_{\pi}(s)$$ is simple.

The successor representation $$M$$ can also be learnt using temporal difference-like algorithms.

## Definition

Let $$S$$ denote the state space, let $$R \in \mathbb{R}^{|S|}$$ be a vector denoting the reward in each state i.e. $$R_s = R(s)$$ and let $$T^{\pi} \in \mathbb{R}^{|S| \times |S|}$$ be a matrix denoting the one-step transition matrix under the policy $$\pi$$.

Recall that the state-value function is defined as the expected sum of future rewards:

$V(s_t) := \mathbb{E}_{\pi}[\sum_{k=0}^{k=\infinity} \gamma^{k-1} r(s_{t + k}) \lvert S_t = s_t]$

The distribution of

If the state space $$\mathcal{X}$$ is discrete, then the successor representation can be written as

$S = (I - \gamma T)^{-1} p_0$

The successor representation is a Neumann series and can therefore be expressed as:

$M^{\pi} := \sum_{k=0}^{\infty} (\gamma T^{\pi})^k = (I - \gamma T^{\pi})^{-1}$

## Learning the Successor Representation

One can learn the successor representation from samples with TD-learning. Let $$M^{\pi}_{(n)}$$ denote the SR after the $$n$$th update and let $$\eta$$ denote the learning rate. The Bellman update is:

M_{(n+1)}^{\pi} \leftarrow M_{(n)}^{\pi} + \eta (\mathbb{I}() + \gamma M_{(n)}^{\pi} - M_{(n)}^{\pi})