Related papers: Value Function Spaces: Skill-Centric State Abstrac…
Decision-making in complex, continuous multi-task environments is often hindered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate models for planning and the inefficiency of learning purely from trial and error. While precise environment dynamics…
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…
We investigate a paradigm in multi-task reinforcement learning (MT-RL) in which an agent is placed in an environment and needs to learn to perform a series of tasks, within this space. Since the environment does not change, there is…
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…
Abstraction is key to scaling up reinforcement learning (RL). However, autonomously learning abstract state and action representations to enable transfer and generalization remains a challenging open problem. This paper presents a novel…
Reinforcement learning in problems with symbolic state spaces is challenging due to the need for reasoning over long horizons. This paper presents a new approach that utilizes relational abstractions in conjunction with deep learning to…
Long-horizon contact-rich tasks are challenging to learn with reinforcement learning, due to ineffective exploration of high-dimensional state spaces with sparse rewards. The learning process often gets stuck in local optimum and demands…
Open-ended learning benefits immensely from the use of symbolic methods for goal representation as they offer ways to structure knowledge for efficient and transferable learning. However, the existing Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning…
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…
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…
State abstraction has been an essential tool for dramatically improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement-learning algorithms. Indeed, by exposing and accentuating various types of latent structure within the environment, different…
We propose a new perspective on representation learning in reinforcement learning based on geometric properties of the space of value functions. We leverage this perspective to provide formal evidence regarding the usefulness of value…
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…
General purpose agents will require large repertoires of skills. Empowerment -- the maximum mutual information between skills and states -- provides a pathway for learning large collections of distinct skills, but mutual information is…
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…
Can simple algorithms with a good representation solve challenging reinforcement learning problems? In this work, we answer this question in the affirmative, where we take "simple learning algorithm" to be tabular Q-Learning, the "good…
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…
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…
One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…
In recent years, the robotics community has made substantial progress in robotic manipulation using deep reinforcement learning (RL). Effectively learning of long-horizon tasks remains a challenging topic. Typical RL-based methods…