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Developing agents capable of exploring, planning and learning in complex open-ended environments is a grand challenge in artificial intelligence (AI). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) offers a promising solution to this challenge…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Martin Klissarov , Akhil Bagaria , Ziyan Luo , George Konidaris , Doina Precup , Marlos C. Machado

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable promise in reasoning and decision-making, yet their integration with Reinforcement Learning (RL) for complex robotic tasks remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose an LLM-guided…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Chak Lam Shek , Pratap Tokekar

We propose a hierarchical entity-centric framework for offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) that combines subgoal decomposition with factored structure to solve long-horizon tasks in domains with multiple entities.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Dan Haramati , Carl Qi , Tal Daniel , Amy Zhang , Aviv Tamar , George Konidaris

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Hemanath Arumugam , Falong Fan , Bo Liu

Hierarchical agents have the potential to solve sequential decision making tasks with greater sample efficiency than their non-hierarchical counterparts because hierarchical agents can break down tasks into sets of subtasks that only…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Andrew Levy , George Konidaris , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Jan Wöhlke , Felix Schmitt , Herke van Hoof

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective at enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet underlying mechanisms driving this success remain largely opaque. Our analysis reveals that puzzling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haozhe Wang , Qixin Xu , Che Liu , Junhong Wu , Fangzhen Lin , Wenhu Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Kishor Jothimurugan , Osbert Bastani , Rajeev Alur

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from pre-collected datasets, avoiding costly and risky online interactions, but it often struggles with long-horizon tasks involving sparse rewards. Existing goal-conditioned and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Chengyang Gu , Yuxin Pan , Hui Xiong , Yize Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-21 Tianmin Shu , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

Developing an automated driving system capable of navigating complex traffic environments remains a formidable challenge. Unlike rule-based or supervised learning-based methods, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based controllers eliminate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Zhihao Zhang , Ekim Yurtsever , Keith A. Redmill

Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods allow for learning scalable multi-agent policies, but suffer from partial observability and induced non-stationarity. These challenges can be addressed by introducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tommaso Marzi , Cesare Alippi , Andrea Cini

Hierarchical model-based reinforcement learning (HMBRL) aims to combine the benefits of better sample efficiency of model based reinforcement learning (MBRL) with the abstraction capability of hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Robin Schiewer , Anand Subramoney , Laurenz Wiskott

Planning safe trajectories under uncertain and dynamic conditions makes the autonomous driving problem significantly complex. Current sampling-based methods such as Rapidly Exploring Random Trees (RRTs) are not ideal for this problem…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Kaleb Ben Naveed , Zhiqian Qiao , John M. Dolan

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) agents often struggle with long-horizon visual planning due to their reliance on error-prone distance metrics. We propose Discrete Hierarchical Planning (DHP), a method that replaces continuous…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Shashank Sharma , Janina Hoffmann , Vinay Namboodiri