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Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Matthias Grossglauser

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Hierarchical learning (HL) is key to solving complex sequential decision problems with long horizons and sparse rewards. It allows learning agents to break-up large problems into smaller, more manageable subtasks. A common approach to HL,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Garrett Andersen , Peter Vrancx , Haitham Bou-Ammar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Ayoub Ghriss , Masashi Sugiyama , Alessandro Lazaric

Machine learning algorithms learn to solve a task, but are unable to improve their ability to learn. Meta-learning methods learn about machine learning algorithms and improve them so that they learn more quickly. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Calarina Muslimani , Alex Lewandowski , Dale Schuurmans , Matthew E. Taylor , Jun Luo

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (GCHRL) provides a promising approach to solving long-horizon tasks. Recently, its success has been extended to more general settings by concurrently learning hierarchical policies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Siyuan Li , Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Yang Yu , Chongjie Zhang

A significant element of human cooperative intelligence lies in our ability to identify opportunities for fruitful collaboration; and conversely to recognise when the task at hand is better pursued alone. Research on flexible cooperation in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Max Taylor-Davies , Neil Bramley , Christopher G. Lucas

Sequence models in reinforcement learning require task knowledge to estimate the task policy. This paper presents a hierarchical algorithm for learning a sequence model from demonstrations. The high-level mechanism guides the low-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-22 André Correia , Luís A. Alexandre

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Efficient exploration for automatic subgoal discovery is a challenging problem in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL). In this paper, we show that intrinsic motivation learning increases the efficiency of exploration, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

In multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the reward for each goal is sparse, and located in a small neighborhood of the goal. In large dimension, the probability of reaching a reward vanishes and the agent receives little…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Léonard Blier , Yann Ollivier

We study a Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) problem in which $n$ agents collaboratively learn a single policy without sharing the trajectories they collected during agent-environment interaction. We stress the constraint of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Hao Jin , Yang Peng , Wenhao Yang , Shusen Wang , Zhihua Zhang

This paper presents a novel state representation for reward-free Markov decision processes. The idea is to learn, in a self-supervised manner, an embedding space where distances between pairs of embedded states correspond to the minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Lorenzo Steccanella , Anders Jonsson

We propose a graphical model framework for goal-conditioned RL, with an EM algorithm that operates on the lower bound of the RL objective. The E-step provides a natural interpretation of how 'learning in hindsight' techniques, such as HER,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Yunhao Tang , Alp Kucukelbir

In this work we present a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for linearly-solvable Markov decision processes. Our approach assumes that the state space is partitioned, and the subtasks consist in moving between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks pose fundamental challenges for reinforcement learning (RL), particularly when goals are distant and rewards are sparse. While hierarchical and graph-based methods offer partial solutions, their reliance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jaebak Hwang , Sanghyeon Lee , Jeongmo Kim , Seungyul Han

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

Recently, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to the logical game of Go, various Atari games, and even a 3D game, Labyrinth, though it continues to have problems in sparse reward settings. It is difficult to explore, but…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-14 Sungtae Lee , Sang-Woo Lee , Jinyoung Choi , Dong-Hyun Kwak , Byoung-Tak Zhang

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

We investigate reinforcement learning in the Game Of Hidden Rules (GOHR) environment, a complex puzzle in which an agent must infer and execute hidden rules to clear a 6$\times$6 board by placing game pieces into buckets. We explore two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Christo Mathew , Wentian Wang , Jacob Feldman , Lazaros K. Gallos , Paul B. Kantor , Vladimir Menkov , Hao Wang