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Related papers: Learning Abstract Options

200 papers

Augmenting an agent's control with useful higher-level behaviors called options can greatly reduce the sample complexity of reinforcement learning, but manually designing options is infeasible in high-dimensional and abstract state spaces.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-06 Roy Fox , Sanjay Krishnan , Ion Stoica , Ken Goldberg

This paper introduces MANGO (Multilayer Abstraction for Nested Generation of Options), a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework designed to address the challenges of long-term sparse reward environments. MANGO decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Alessio Arcudi , Davide Sartor , Alberto Sinigaglia , Vincent François-Lavet , Gian Antonio Susto

Temporal abstractions in the form of options have been shown to help reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn faster. However, despite prior work on this topic, the problem of discovering options through interaction with an environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Vivek Veeriah , Tom Zahavy , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Junhyuk Oh , Iurii Kemaev , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh

Abstraction is essential for reducing the complexity of systems across diverse fields, yet designing effective abstraction methodology for probabilistic models is inherently challenging due to stochastic behaviors and uncertainties. Current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Nijesh Upreti , Vaishak Belle

Reinforcement learning (RL) on high-dimensional and complex problems relies on abstraction for improved efficiency and generalization. In this paper, we study abstraction in the continuous-control setting, and extend the definition of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Prakash Panangaden , Sahand Rezaei-Shoshtari , Rosie Zhao , David Meger , Doina Precup

We are concerned with the question of how an agent can acquire its own representations from sensory data. We restrict our focus to learning representations for long-term planning, a class of problems that state-of-the-art learning methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Steven James , Benjamin Rosman , George Konidaris

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Philippe Morere , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Discovering useful temporal abstractions, in the form of options, is widely thought to be key to applying reinforcement learning and planning to increasingly complex domains. Building on the empirical success of the Expert Iteration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Kenny Young , Richard S. Sutton

The recommender system is an important form of intelligent application, which assists users to alleviate from information redundancy. Among the metrics used to evaluate a recommender system, the metric of conversion has become more and more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Dongyang Zhao , Liang Zhang , Bo Zhang , Lizhou Zheng , Yongjun Bao , Weipeng Yan

Robust reinforcement learning aims to produce policies that have strong guarantees even in the face of environments/transition models whose parameters have strong uncertainty. Existing work uses value-based methods and the usual primitive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Shie Mannor

Due to recent empirical successes, the options framework for hierarchical reinforcement learning is gaining increasing popularity. Rather than learning from rewards which suffers from the curse of dimensionality, we consider learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Zhiyu Zhang , Ioannis Paschalidis

The recently proposed option-critic architecture Bacon et al. provide a stochastic policy gradient approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning. Specifically, they provide a way to estimate the gradient of the expected discounted return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Saket Tiwari , Philip S. Thomas

We introduce an algorithm for model-based hierarchical reinforcement learning to acquire self-contained transition and reward models suitable for probabilistic planning at multiple levels of abstraction. We call this framework Planning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 John Winder , Stephanie Milani , Matthew Landen , Erebus Oh , Shane Parr , Shawn Squire , Marie desJardins , Cynthia Matuszek

This paper addresses the problem of learning abstractions that boost robot planning performance while providing strong guarantees of reliability. Although state-of-the-art hierarchical robot planning algorithms allow robots to efficiently…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Naman Shah , Siddharth Srivastava

Reinforcement learning defines the problem facing agents that learn to make good decisions through action and observation alone. To be effective problem solvers, such agents must efficiently explore vast worlds, assign credit from delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 David Abel

We introduce a new hierarchical deep learning framework for recursive higher-order meta-learning that enables neural networks (NNs) to construct, solve, and generalise across hierarchies of tasks. Central to this approach is a generative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 David H. Mguni

The options framework for hierarchical reinforcement learning has increased its popularity in recent years and has made improvements in tackling the scalability problem in reinforcement learning. Yet, most of these recent successes are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-11 Vittorio Giammarino , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

We introduce Hindsight Off-policy Options (HO2), a data-efficient option learning algorithm. Given any trajectory, HO2 infers likely option choices and backpropagates through the dynamic programming inference procedure to robustly train all…

An effective approach to solving long-horizon tasks in robotics domains with continuous state and action spaces is bilevel planning, wherein a high-level search over an abstraction of an environment is used to guide low-level…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Nishanth Kumar , Willie McClinton , Rohan Chitnis , Tom Silver , Tomás Lozano-Pérez , Leslie Pack Kaelbling