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Solving complex, temporally-extended tasks is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning (RL). We hypothesize that one critical element of solving such problems is the notion of compositionality. With the ability to learn concepts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Yiding Jiang , Shixiang Gu , Kevin Murphy , Chelsea Finn

Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar , Naman Shah , Siddharth Srivastava

We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for Linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. Unlike previous work, our approach allows learning low-level and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Guillermo Infante , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Long-horizon manipulation tasks such as stacking represent a longstanding challenge in the field of robotic manipulation, particularly when using reinforcement learning (RL) methods which often struggle to learn the correct sequence of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Jing Zhang , Emmanuel Dean , Karinne Ramirez-Amaro

We address the problem of learning hierarchical deep neural network policies for reinforcement learning. In contrast to methods that explicitly restrict or cripple lower layers of a hierarchy to force them to use higher-level modulating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Tuomas Haarnoja , Kristian Hartikainen , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Feature selection aims to preprocess the target dataset, find an optimal and most streamlined feature subset, and enhance the downstream machine learning task. Among filter, wrapper, and embedded-based approaches, the reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Weiliang Zhang , Xiaohan Huang , Yi Du , Ziyue Qiao , Qingqing Long , Zhen Meng , Yuanchun Zhou , Meng Xiao

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

This paper addresses the problem of learning abstractions that boost robot planning performance while providing strong guarantees of reliability. Although state-of-the-art hierarchical robot planning algorithms allow robots to efficiently…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Naman Shah , Siddharth Srivastava

Tabular reinforcement learning methods cannot operate directly on continuous state spaces. One solution for this problem is to partition the state space. A good partitioning enables generalization during learning and more efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Mohsen Ghaffari , Mahsa Varshosaz , Einar Broch Johnsen , Andrzej Wąsowski

The interpretation of spatial references is highly contextual, requiring joint inference over both language and the environment. We consider the task of spatial reasoning in a simulated environment, where an agent can act and receive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Michael Janner , Karthik Narasimhan , Regina Barzilay

Many researchers have explored methods for hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) with temporal abstractions, in which abstract actions are defined that can perform many primitive actions before terminating. However, little is known about…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Thomas G. Dietterich

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many impressive results in recent years. However, tasks with sparse rewards or long horizons continue to pose significant challenges. To tackle these important problems, we propose a general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-12 Carlos Florensa , Yan Duan , Pieter Abbeel

This paper introduces an automated skill acquisition framework in reinforcement learning which involves identifying a hierarchical description of the given task in terms of abstract states and extended actions between abstract states.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Aravind Srinivas , Ramnandan Krishnamurthy , Peeyush Kumar , Balaraman Ravindran

Skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy to leverage prior knowledge for accelerated robot learning. Skills are typically extracted from expert demonstrations and are embedded into a latent space from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Krishan Rana , Ming Xu , Brendan Tidd , Michael Milford , Niko Sünderhauf

Learning abstractions directly from data is a core challenge in robotics. Humans naturally operate at an abstract level, reasoning over high-level subgoals while delegating execution to low-level motor skills -- an ability that enables…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Abhiroop Ajith , Constantinos Chamzas

Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown its ability in solving complicated problems directly from high-dimensional observations. However, in end-to-end settings, Reinforcement Learning algorithms are not sample-efficient and requires long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Nicolò Botteghi , Mannes Poel , Beril Sirmacek , Christoph Brune

An open problem in artificial intelligence is how to learn and represent knowledge that is sufficient for a general agent that needs to solve multiple tasks in a given world. In this work we propose world value functions (WVFs), which are a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-19 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

We study the problem of representation learning in goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning. In such hierarchical structures, a higher-level controller solves tasks by iteratively communicating goals which a lower-level policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

In many real-world scenarios, an autonomous agent often encounters various tasks within a single complex environment. We propose to build a graph abstraction over the environment structure to accelerate the learning of these tasks. Here,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Wenling Shang , Alex Trott , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher