  Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a vital modeling technique that rely on
internal states learned indirectly by optimization of a supervised,
unsupervised, or reinforcement training loss. RNNs are used to model dynamic
processes that are characterized by underlying latent states whose form is
often unknown, precluding its analytic representation inside an RNN. In the
Predictive-State Representation (PSR) literature, latent state processes are
modeled by an internal state representation that directly models the
distribution of future observations, and most recent work in this area has
relied on explicitly representing and targeting sufficient statistics of this
probability distribution. We seek to combine the advantages of RNNs and PSRs by
augmenting existing state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks with
Predictive-State Decoders (PSDs), which add supervision to the network's
internal state representation to target predicting future observations.
Predictive-State Decoders are simple to implement and easily incorporated into
existing training pipelines via additional loss regularization. We demonstrate
the effectiveness of PSDs with experimental results in three different domains:
probabilistic filtering, Imitation Learning, and Reinforcement Learning. In
each, our method improves statistical performance of state-of-the-art recurrent
baselines and does so with fewer iterations and less data.
