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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Zhening Li , Gabriel Poesia , Armando Solar-Lezama

Recommender Systems (RS) are fundamental to modern online services. While most existing approaches optimize for short-term engagement, recent work has begun to explore reinforcement learning (RL) to model long-term user value. However,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Minmao Wang , Xingchen Liu , Shijie Yi , Likang Wu , Hongke Zhao , Fei Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang

While deep reinforcement learning methods have shown impressive results in robot learning, their sample inefficiency makes the learning of complex, long-horizon behaviors with real robot systems infeasible. To mitigate this issue,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Taewook Nam , Shao-Hua Sun , Karl Pertsch , Sung Ju Hwang , Joseph J Lim

Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) facilitates rapid adaptation to unseen tasks but faces challenges in long-horizon environments. Skill-based approaches tackle this by decomposing state-action sequences into reusable skills and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Sanghyeon Lee , Sangjun Bae , Yisak Park , Seungyul Han

Agentic large language models often rely on skills, reusable natural language procedures that guide planning, action, and tool use. In practice, skills are typically improved through prompt engineering or by aligning the task LLM itself,…

Many real-world applications can be formulated as multi-agent cooperation problems, such as network packet routing and coordination of autonomous vehicles. The emergence of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a promising approach for…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Zhixuan Liang , Jiannong Cao , Shan Jiang , Divya Saxena , Huafeng Xu

Skills learned through (deep) reinforcement learning often generalizes poorly across domains and re-training is necessary when presented with a new task. We present a framework that combines techniques in \textit{formal methods} with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Xiao Li , Yao Ma , Calin Belta

Autonomous driving has achieved significant progress in recent years, but autonomous cars are still unable to tackle high-risk situations where a potential accident is likely. In such near-accident scenarios, even a minor change in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Zhangjie Cao , Erdem Bıyık , Woodrow Z. Wang , Allan Raventos , Adrien Gaidon , Guy Rosman , Dorsa Sadigh

Despite advances in hierarchical reinforcement learning, its applications to path planning in autonomous driving on highways are challenging. One reason is that conventional hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches are not amenable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Jaehyun Kim , Jaeseung Jeong

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

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

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

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) learns to make decisions on multiple levels of temporal abstraction. A key challenge in HRL is that the low-level policy changes over time, making it difficult for the high-level policy to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

The high-dimensional or sparse reward task of a reinforcement learning (RL) environment requires a superior potential controller such as hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) rather than an atomic RL because it absorbs the complexity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 JaeYoon Kim , Junyu Xuan , Christy Liang , Farookh Hussain

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for quadruped locomotion over challenging terrain. Our approach incorporates a two-layer hierarchy in which a high-level policy (HLP) selects optimal goals for a low-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Jeremiah Coholich , Muhammad Ali Murtaza , Seth Hutchinson , Zsolt Kira

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables robots to perform some intelligent tasks end-to-end. However, there are still many challenges for long-horizon sparse-reward robotic manipulator tasks. On the one hand, a sparse-reward setting…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Guangming Wang , Minjian Xin , Wenhua Wu , Zhe Liu , Hesheng Wang