English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning Abstract Options

200 papers

In this work, we consider the problem of autonomously discovering behavioral abstractions, or options, for reinforcement learning agents. We propose an algorithm that focuses on the termination condition, as opposed to -- as is common --…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-27 Anna Harutyunyan , Will Dabney , Diana Borsa , Nicolas Heess , Remi Munos , Doina Precup

Recent work has shown that temporally extended actions (options) can be learned fully end-to-end as opposed to being specified in advance. While the problem of "how" to learn options is increasingly well understood, the question of "what"…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Jean Harb , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Martin Klissarov , Doina Precup

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Kushal Chauhan , Soumya Chatterjee , Akash Reddy , Balaraman Ravindran , Pradeep Shenoy

Learning options that allow agents to exhibit temporally higher order behavior has proven to be useful in increasing exploration, reducing sample complexity and for various transfer scenarios. Deep Discovery of Options (DDO) is a generative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-06 Ameet Deshpande , Harshavardhan Kamarthi , Balaraman Ravindran

Out of the many deep reinforcement learning approaches for autonomous driving, only few make use of the options (or skills) framework. That is surprising, as this framework is naturally suited for hierarchical control applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Bram De Cooman , Johan Suykens

Abstraction plays an important role in the generalisation of knowledge and skills and is key to sample efficient learning. In this work, we study joint temporal and state abstraction in reinforcement learning, where temporally-extended…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Dongge Han , Sebastian Tschiatschek

Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Arushi Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

Modern listwise recommendation systems need to consider both long-term user perceptions and short-term interest shifts. Reinforcement learning can be applied on recommendation to study such a problem but is also subject to large search…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Luo Ji , Gao Liu , Mingyang Yin , Hongxia Yang , Jingren Zhou

Hierarchical abstractions, also known as options -- a type of temporally extended action (Sutton et. al. 1999) that enables a reinforcement learning agent to plan at a higher level, abstracting away from the lower-level details. In this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-22 Daniel J. Mankowitz , Aviv Tamar , Shie Mannor

A large variety of real-world Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks is characterized by a complex and heterogeneous structure that makes end-to-end (or flat) approaches hardly applicable or even infeasible. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

The option framework has shown great promise by automatically extracting temporally-extended sub-tasks from a long-horizon task. Methods have been proposed for concurrently learning low-level intra-option policies and high-level option…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Chenghao Li , Xiaoteng Ma , Chongjie Zhang , Jun Yang , Li Xia , Qianchuan Zhao

Reasoning at multiple levels of temporal abstraction is one of the key attributes of intelligence. In reinforcement learning, this is often modeled through temporally extended courses of actions called options. Options allow agents to make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Marlos C. Machado , Andre Barreto , Doina Precup , Michael Bowling

Humans and animals have the ability to reason and make predictions about different courses of action at many time scales. In reinforcement learning, option models (Sutton, Precup \& Singh, 1999; Precup, 2000) provide the framework for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Khimya Khetarpal , Zafarali Ahmed , Gheorghe Comanici , Doina Precup

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) offers a practical learning paradigm in which goal-reaching policies are trained from abundant state-action trajectory datasets without additional environment interaction. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Hongjoon Ahn , Heewoong Choi , Jisu Han , Taesup Moon

Decision-making AI agents are often faced with two important challenges: the depth of the planning horizon, and the branching factor due to having many choices. Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods aim to solve the first problem, by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Andrei Nica , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-06 Arjun Manoharan , Rahul Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

Lying on the heart of intelligent decision-making systems, how policy is represented and optimized is a fundamental problem. The root challenge in this problem is the large scale and the high complexity of policy space, which exacerbates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Min Zhang , Hongyao Tang , Jianye Hao , Yan Zheng

We extend the options framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning from discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) to average-reward MDPs. Our contributions include general convergent off-policy inter-option learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Yi Wan , Abhishek Naik , Richard S. Sutton

An open problem in artificial intelligence is how systems can flexibly learn discrete abstractions that are useful for solving inherently continuous problems. Previous work in computational neuroscience has considered this functional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Poppy Collis , Ryan Singh , Paul F Kinghorn , Christopher L Buckley

Learning composable policies for environments with complex rules and tasks is a challenging problem. We introduce a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework called the Logical Options Framework (LOF) that learns policies that are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Brandon Araki , Xiao Li , Kiran Vodrahalli , Jonathan DeCastro , Micah J. Fry , Daniela Rus