Related papers: Option Discovery in Hierarchical Reinforcement Lea…
Decision-making in complex, continuous multi-task environments is often hindered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate models for planning and the inefficiency of learning purely from trial and error. While precise environment dynamics…
We introduce a new approach to hierarchy formation and task decomposition in hierarchical reinforcement learning. Our method is based on the Hierarchy Of Abstract Machines (HAM) framework because HAM approach is able to design efficient…
Abstraction is key to scaling up reinforcement learning (RL). However, autonomously learning abstract state and action representations to enable transfer and generalization remains a challenging open problem. This paper presents a novel…
Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…
Standard reinforcement learning algorithms with a single policy perform poorly on tasks in complex environments involving sparse rewards, diverse behaviors, or long-term planning. This led to the study of algorithms that incorporate…
Option discovery and skill acquisition frameworks are integral to the functioning of a Hierarchically organized Reinforcement learning agent. However, such techniques often yield a large number of options or skills, which can potentially be…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning has focused on discovering temporally extended actions, such as options, that can provide benefits in problems requiring extensive exploration. One promising approach that learns these options end-to-end…
We present a framework for learning to plan hierarchically in domains with unknown dynamics. We enhance planning performance by exploiting problem structure in several ways: (i) We simplify the search over plans by leveraging knowledge of…
Learning policies for complex tasks that require multiple different skills is a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). It is also a requirement for its deployment in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a novel framework for…
The options framework in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning breaks down overall goals into a combination of options or simpler tasks and associated policies, allowing for abstraction in the action space. Ideally, these options can be…
Open-ended learning benefits immensely from the use of symbolic methods for goal representation as they offer ways to structure knowledge for efficient and transferable learning. However, the existing Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning…
In many real-world scenarios, an autonomous agent often encounters various tasks within a single complex environment. We propose to build a graph abstraction over the environment structure to accelerate the learning of these tasks. Here,…
General purpose agents will require large repertoires of skills. Empowerment -- the maximum mutual information between skills and states -- provides a pathway for learning large collections of distinct skills, but mutual information is…
We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for control with continuous state and action spaces. In our framework, the user specifies subgoal regions which are subsets of states; then, we (i) learn options that serve as…
Understanding surgical tasks represents an important challenge for autonomy in surgical robotic systems. To achieve this, we propose an online task segmentation framework that uses hierarchical transition state clustering to activate…
Skills learned through (deep) reinforcement learning often generalizes poorly across domains and re-training is necessary when presented with a new task. We present a framework that combines techniques in \textit{formal methods} with…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) enhances the scalability of decision-making in long-horizon tasks by introducing temporal abstraction through options-policies that span multiple timesteps. Despite its theoretical appeal, the…
The current thesis aims to explore the reinforcement learning field and build on existing methods to produce improved ones to tackle the problem of learning in high-dimensional and complex environments. It addresses such goals by…
Building systems that autonomously create temporal abstractions from data is a key challenge in scaling learning and planning in reinforcement learning. One popular approach for addressing this challenge is the options framework (Sutton et…
Reinforcement learning has been applied to many interesting problems such as the famous TD-gammon and the inverted helicopter flight. However, little effort has been put into developing methods to learn policies for complex persistent tasks…