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Related papers: SHIRO: Soft Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Hierarchical policies enable strong performance in many sequential decision-making problems, such as those with high-dimensional action spaces, those requiring long-horizon planning, and settings with sparse rewards. However, learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Carolin Schmidt , Daniele Gammelli , James Harrison , Marco Pavone , Filipe Rodrigues

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used to learn effective heuristics for solving complex combinatorial optimisation problem via policy networks and have demonstrated promising performance. Existing works have focused on solving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , A. K. Qin , Tabinda Sarwar

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

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

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporal abstraction to solve large Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and provide transferable subtask policies. In this paper, we introduce an off-policy HRL algorithm: Hierarchical Q-value…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-30 Tiancheng Zhao , Mohammad Gowayyed

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Tuomas Haarnoja , Aurick Zhou , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

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

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that remain effective despite uncertainties in its environment, which frequently arise in real-world applications due to variations in environment dynamics. The robust RL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Linh Le Pham Van , Minh Hoang Nguyen , Hung Le , Hung The Tran , Sunil Gupta

An inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) agent learns to act intelligently by observing expert demonstrations and learning the expert's underlying reward function. Although learning the reward functions from demonstrations has achieved great…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Wei Gao , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) holds great potential for sample-efficient learning on challenging long-horizon tasks. In particular, letting a higher level assign subgoals to a lower level has been shown to enable fast learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Nico Gürtler , Dieter Büchler , Georg Martius

Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have been developed to optimize industrial cooling systems, offering substantial energy savings compared to traditional heuristic policies. A major challenge in industrial control involves learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 William Wong , Praneet Dutta , Octavian Voicu , Yuri Chervonyi , Cosmin Paduraru , Jerry Luo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) struggles in problems with delayed rewards, and one approach is to segment the task into sub-tasks with incremental rewards. We propose a framework called Hierarchical Inverse Reinforcement Learning (HIRL), which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Sanjay Krishnan , Animesh Garg , Richard Liaw , Lauren Miller , Florian T. Pokorny , Ken Goldberg

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function and the associated optimal policy that best fits observed sequences of states and actions implemented by an expert. Many algorithms for IRL have an inherently nested…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

We propose a systematic method based on reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to find the optimal path that can minimize the total entropy production between two equilibrium states of open systems at the same temperature in a given fixed…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-06-07 Rongxing Xu

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Navyata Sanghvi , Shinnosuke Usami , Mohit Sharma , Joachim Groeger , Kris Kitani

Hierarchies of temporally decoupled policies present a promising approach for enabling structured exploration in complex long-term planning problems. To fully achieve this approach an end-to-end training paradigm is needed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Abdul Rahman Kreidieh , Glen Berseth , Brandon Trabucco , Samyak Parajuli , Sergey Levine , Alexandre M. Bayen

Offline Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potent in many safe-critical tasks in robotics where exploration is risky and expensive. However, it still struggles to acquire skills in temporally extended tasks. In this paper, we study the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach for managing task complexity across multiple levels of abstraction and accelerating long-horizon agent exploration. However, the effectiveness of hierarchical policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Xianghua Zeng , Hao Peng , Dingli Su , Angsheng Li