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In recent years, Hypergraph Neural Networks (HNNs) have demonstrated immense potential in handling complex systems with high-order interactions. However, acquiring large-scale, high-quality labeled data for these models is costly, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yanheng Hou , Xunkai Li , Zhenjun Li , Bing Zhou , Ronghua Li , Guoren Wang

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

Enabling humans and robots to collaborate effectively requires purposeful communication and an understanding of each other's affordances. Prior work in human-robot collaboration has incorporated knowledge of human affordances, i.e., their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Drake Moore , Mark Zolotas , Taskin Padir

Reinforcement learning has been successful in many tasks ranging from robotic control, games, energy management etc. In complex real world environments with sparse rewards and long task horizons, sample efficiency is still a major…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Bharat Prakash , Nicholas Waytowich , Tim Oates , Tinoosh Mohsenin

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 2023-09-15 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

To achieve the ambitious goals of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning must include planning with a model of the world that is abstract in state and time. Deep learning has made progress with state abstraction, but temporal…

Training LLMs as interactive agents for multi-turn decision-making remains challenging, particularly in long-horizon tasks with sparse and delayed rewards, where agents must execute extended sequences of actions before receiving meaningful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiangweizhi Peng , Yuanxin Liu , Ruida Zhou , Charles Fleming , Zhaoran Wang , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has been a compelling approach for achieving goal directed behavior over long sequences of actions. However, it has been challenging to implement in realistic or open-ended environments. A main challenge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Arun Ahuja , Kavya Kopparapu , Rob Fergus , Ishita Dasgupta

A large variety of real-world Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks is characterized by a complex and heterogeneous structure that makes end-to-end (or flat) approaches hardly applicable or even infeasible. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Hierarchical learning (HL) is key to solving complex sequential decision problems with long horizons and sparse rewards. It allows learning agents to break-up large problems into smaller, more manageable subtasks. A common approach to HL,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Garrett Andersen , Peter Vrancx , Haitham Bou-Ammar

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

Traditional autonomous vehicle pipelines that follow a modular approach have been very successful in the past both in academia and industry, which has led to autonomy deployed on road. Though this approach provides ease of interpretation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-18 Tanmay Agarwal , Hitesh Arora , Jeff Schneider

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable effective decision-making over long timescales. Existing approaches, while promising, have yet to realize the benefits of large-scale training. In this work, we identify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Mikael Henaff , Scott Fujimoto , Michael Matthews , Michael Rabbat

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Andrew Levy , Sreehari Rammohan , Alessandro Allievi , Scott Niekum , George Konidaris

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant success at solving difficult reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. Previous works have motivated the use of hierarchy by appealing to a number of intuitive benefits, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Ofir Nachum , Haoran Tang , Xingyu Lu , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

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

In this paper, we study the cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems using Reward Machines (RMs) to specify the reward functions such that the prior knowledge of high-level events in a task can be leveraged to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Xuejing Zheng , Chao Yu

Intelligent agents working in real-world environments must be able to learn about the environment and its capabilities which enable them to take actions to change to the state of the world to complete a complex multi-step task in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Rajesh Mangannavar

We investigate how reinforcement learning agents can learn to cooperate. Drawing inspiration from human societies, in which successful coordination of many individuals is often facilitated by hierarchical organisation, we introduce Feudal…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-01-28 Sanjeevan Ahilan , Peter Dayan

Deep reinforcement learning agents are often misaligned, as they over-exploit early reward signals. Recently, several symbolic approaches have addressed these challenges by encoding sparse objectives along with aligned plans. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zihan Ye , Phil Chau , Raban Emunds , Jannis Blüml , Cedric Derstroff , Quentin Delfosse , Oleg Arenz , Kristian Kersting