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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

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is hypothesized to be able to leverage the inherent hierarchy in learning tasks where traditional reinforcement learning (RL) often fails. In this research, HRL is evaluated and contrasted with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Brendon Johnson , Alfredo Weitzenfeld

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

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has seen widespread interest as an approach to tractable learning of complex modular behaviors. However, existing work either assume access to expert-constructed hierarchies, or use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Kurtland Chua , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is well-suitedd for solving complex tasks by breaking them down into structured policies. However, HRL agents often struggle with efficient exploration and quick adaptation. To overcome these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Arash Khajooeinejad , Fatemeh Sadat Masoumi , Masoumeh Chapariniya

Reinforcement learning practitioners often avoid hierarchical policies, especially in image-based observation spaces. Typically, the single-task performance improvement over flat-policy counterparts does not justify the additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Tudor Cristea-Platon , Bogdan Mazoure , Josh Susskind , Walter Talbott

How do people decide how long to continue in a task, when to switch, and to which other task? Understanding the mechanisms that underpin task interleaving is a long-standing goal in the cognitive sciences. Prior work suggests greedy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-08 Christoph Gebhardt , Antti Oulasvirta , Otmar Hilliges

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

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

Recent work in hierarchical reinforcement learning has shown success in scaling to billions of timesteps when learning over a set of predefined option reward functions. We show that, instead of using a single reward function per option, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Michael Tryfan Matthews , Anssi Kanervisto , Jakob Foerster , Pierluca D'Oro , Scott Fujimoto , Mikael Henaff

In reinforcement learning, pre-trained low-level skills have the potential to greatly facilitate exploration. However, prior knowledge of the downstream task is required to strike the right balance between generality (fine-grained control)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Jonas Gehring , Gabriel Synnaeve , Andreas Krause , Nicolas Usunier

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

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Siyuan Li , Rui Wang , Minxue Tang , Chongjie Zhang

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach to extend traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods to solve more complex tasks. Yet, the majority of current HRL methods require careful task-specific design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly used in autonomous driving (AD) and shows clear advantages. However, most RL-based AD methods overlook policy structure design. An RL policy that only outputs short-timescale vehicle control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Guizhe Jin , Zhuoren Li , Bo Leng , Ran Yu , Lu Xiong , Chen Sun

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

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of-the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Robert Tjarko Lange , Aldo Faisal

We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for quadruped locomotion over challenging terrain. Our approach incorporates a two-layer hierarchy in which a high-level policy (HLP) selects optimal goals for a low-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Jeremiah Coholich , Muhammad Ali Murtaza , Seth Hutchinson , Zsolt Kira

Real-world tasks are often highly structured. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has attracted research interest as an approach for leveraging the hierarchical structure of a given task in reinforcement learning (RL). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Takayuki Osa , Voot Tangkaratt , Masashi Sugiyama

Skills are temporal abstractions that are intended to improve reinforcement learning (RL) performance through hierarchical RL. Despite our intuition about the properties of an environment that make skills useful, a precise characterization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Zhening Li , Gabriel Poesia , Armando Solar-Lezama
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