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Related papers: Modulated Policy Hierarchies

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Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular control method that has proved effective for robotics, among other fields. MPC performs re-planning at every time step. Re-planning is done with a limited horizon per computational and real-time…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-03-22 Aviv Tamar , Garrett Thomas , Tianhao Zhang , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

Reward machines (RMs) are a recent formalism for representing the reward function of a reinforcement learning task through a finite-state machine whose edges encode subgoals of the task using high-level events. The structure of RMs enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Mark Law , Anders Jonsson , Krysia Broda , Alessandra Russo

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

Many hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms utilise a series of independent skills as a basis to solve tasks at a higher level of reasoning. These algorithms don't consider the value of using skills that are cooperative instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Jordan Erskine , Chris Lehnert

We present a modular approach for learning policies for navigation over long planning horizons from language input. Our hierarchical policy operates at multiple timescales, where the higher-level master policy proposes subgoals to be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-05-06 Abhishek Das , Georgia Gkioxari , Stefan Lee , Devi Parikh , Dhruv Batra

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

Legged locomotion is a challenging task for learning algorithms, especially when the task requires a diverse set of primitive behaviors. To solve these problems, we introduce a hierarchical framework to automatically decompose complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-23 Deepali Jain , Atil Iscen , Ken Caluwaerts

Many robotic tasks are composed of a lot of temporally correlated sub-tasks in a highly complex environment. It is important to discover situational intentions and proper actions by deliberating on temporal abstractions to solve problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Se-Wook Yoo , Seung-Woo Seo

Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Chen Tessler , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Shie Mannor

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Humans can leverage hierarchical structures to split a task into sub-tasks and solve problems efficiently. Both imitation and reinforcement learning or a combination of them with hierarchical structures have been proven to be an efficient…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Yaru Niu , Yijun Gu

Sparse rewards and long time horizons remain challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. Exploration bonuses can help in sparse reward settings by encouraging agents to explore the state space, while hierarchical approaches can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Willie McClinton , Andrew Levy , George Konidaris

Learning to solve long horizon temporally extended tasks with reinforcement learning has been a challenge for several years now. We believe that it is important to leverage both the hierarchical structure of complex tasks and to use expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Bharat Prakash , Nicholas Waytowich , Tim Oates , Tinoosh Mohsenin

Many transfer problems require re-using previously optimal decisions for solving new tasks, which suggests the need for learning algorithms that can modify the mechanisms for choosing certain actions independently of those for choosing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-22 Michael Chang , Sidhant Kaushik , Sergey Levine , Thomas L. Griffiths

Reward machines allow the definition of rewards for temporally extended tasks and behaviors. Specifying "informative" reward machines can be challenging. One way to address this is to generate reward machines from a high-level abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Giovanni Varricchione , Natasha Alechina , Mehdi Dastani , Brian Logan

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

Rather than learning new control policies for each new task, it is possible, when tasks share some structure, to compose a "meta-policy" from previously learned policies. This paper reports results from experiments using Deep Reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Richard Liaw , Sanjay Krishnan , Animesh Garg , Daniel Crankshaw , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ken Goldberg

We study how to effectively leverage expert feedback to learn sequential decision-making policies. We focus on problems with sparse rewards and long time horizons, which typically pose significant challenges in reinforcement learning. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Yisong Yue , Hal Daumé

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

We consider a settings of hierarchical reinforcement learning, in which the reward is a sum of components. For each component we are given a policy that maximizes it and our goal is to assemble a policy from the individual policies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-06 Tom Zahavy , Avinatan Hasidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour