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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

In this work, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) structure which is capable of performing autonomous vehicle planning tasks in simulated environments with multiple sub-goals. In this hierarchical structure, the network…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Zhiqian Qiao , Zachariah Tyree , Priyantha Mudalige , Jeff Schneider , John M. Dolan

Planning with a learned model is arguably a key component of intelligence. There are several challenges in realizing such a component in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. One such challenge is dealing effectively with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-11 Vivek Veeriah , Zeyu Zheng , Richard Lewis , Satinder Singh

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

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

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning have made significant impacts across various domains, yet they often struggle in complex multi-agent environments due to issues like algorithm instability, low sampling efficiency, and the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Cheng Xu , Changtian Zhang , Yuchen Shi , Ran Wang , Shihong Duan , Yadong Wan , Xiaotong Zhang

The options framework in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning breaks down overall goals into a combination of options or simpler tasks and associated policies, allowing for abstraction in the action space. Ideally, these options can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Kushal Chauhan , Soumya Chatterjee , Akash Reddy , Balaraman Ravindran , Pradeep Shenoy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Andrew Levy , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

Hierarchical methods in reinforcement learning have the potential to reduce the amount of decisions that the agent needs to perform when learning new tasks. However, finding reusable useful temporal abstractions that facilitate fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-05 David Kuric , Herke van Hoof

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

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

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

Affordances are key attributes of what must be perceived by an autonomous robotic agent in order to effectively interact with novel objects. Historically, the concept derives from the literature in psychology and cognitive science, where…

Affordance, defined as the potential actions that an object offers, is crucial for embodied AI agents. For example, such knowledge directs an agent to grasp a knife by the handle for cutting or by the blade for safe handover. While existing…

Solving long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) addresses this by decomposing tasks into more manageable sub-tasks, but the automatic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yang Yu

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) agents have the potential to demonstrate appealing capabilities such as planning and exploration with abstraction, transfer, and skill reuse. Recent successes with HRL across different domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Bernardo Avila Pires , Feryal Behbahani , Hubert Soyer , Kyriacos Nikiforou , Thomas Keck , Satinder Singh

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporally extended actions, or options, to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective to alleviate the sparse reward problem, one of the most challenging problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Libo Xing

We address the problem of affordance reasoning in diverse scenes that appear in the real world. Affordances relate the agent's actions to their effects when taken on the surrounding objects. In our work, we take the egocentric view of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-06-18 Ching-Yao Chuang , Jiaman Li , Antonio Torralba , Sanja Fidler