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Practising and honing skills forms a fundamental component of how humans learn, yet artificial agents are rarely specifically trained to perform them. Instead, they are usually trained end-to-end, with the hope being that useful skills will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-17 Michael Matthews , Mikayel Samvelyan , Jack Parker-Holder , Edward Grefenstette , Tim Rocktäschel

This work presents a Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework for analyzing simulated air combat scenarios involving heterogeneous agents. The objective is to identify effective Courses of Action that lead to mission…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Ardian Selmonaj , Oleg Szehr , Giacomo Del Rio , Alessandro Antonucci , Adrian Schneider , Michael Rüegsegger

According to cognitive psychology and related disciplines, the development of complex problem-solving behaviour in biological agents depends on hierarchical cognitive mechanisms. Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-19 Manfred Eppe , Christian Gumbsch , Matthias Kerzel , Phuong D. H. Nguyen , Martin V. Butz , Stefan Wermter

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

We present a framework for learning to plan hierarchically in domains with unknown dynamics. We enhance planning performance by exploiting problem structure in several ways: (i) We simplify the search over plans by leveraging knowledge of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Philippe Morere , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

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

The current thesis aims to explore the reinforcement learning field and build on existing methods to produce improved ones to tackle the problem of learning in high-dimensional and complex environments. It addresses such goals by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Ayoub Ghriss , Masashi Sugiyama , Alessandro Lazaric

We present a framework combining hierarchical and multi-agent deep reinforcement learning approaches to solve coordination problems among a multitude of agents using a semi-decentralized model. The framework extends the multi-agent learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-25 Saurabh Kumar , Pararth Shah , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Larry Heck

Many robotic tasks are composed of a lot of temporally correlated sub-tasks in a highly complex environment. It is important to discover situational intentions and proper actions by deliberating on temporal abstractions to solve problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Se-Wook Yoo , Seung-Woo Seo

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Siyuan Li , Rui Wang , Minxue Tang , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning practitioners often avoid hierarchical policies, especially in image-based observation spaces. Typically, the single-task performance improvement over flat-policy counterparts does not justify the additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Tudor Cristea-Platon , Bogdan Mazoure , Josh Susskind , Walter Talbott

Recent challenges in operating power networks arise from increasing energy demands and unpredictable renewable sources like wind and solar. While reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise in managing these networks, through topological…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Erica van der Sar , Alessandro Zocca , Sandjai Bhulai

Problems which require both long-horizon planning and continuous control capabilities pose significant challenges to existing reinforcement learning agents. In this paper we introduce a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning agent which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Jan Achterhold , Markus Krimmel , Joerg Stueckler

Empowerment has the potential to help agents learn large skillsets, but is not yet a scalable solution for training general-purpose agents. Recent empowerment methods learn diverse skillsets by maximizing the mutual information between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Andrew Levy , Alessandro Allievi , George Konidaris

Empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of an agent's potential influence on its environment, has emerged as a powerful intrinsic motivation and exploration framework for reinforcement learning (RL). Besides for unsupervised RL and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Moritz Schneider , Robert Krug , Narunas Vaskevicius , Luigi Palmieri , Michael Volpp , Joschka Boedecker

Decentralized combinatorial optimization in evolving multi-agent systems poses significant challenges, requiring agents to balance long-term decision-making, short-term optimized collective outcomes, while preserving autonomy of interactive…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Chuhao Qin , Evangelos Pournaras

Reinforcement learning can train policies that effectively perform complex tasks. However for long-horizon tasks, the performance of these methods degrades with horizon, often necessitating reasoning over and chaining lower-level skills.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Dhruv Shah , Peng Xu , Yao Lu , Ted Xiao , Alexander Toshev , Sergey Levine , Brian Ichter

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

Multi-task multi-agent reinforcement learning (MT-MARL) has recently gained attention for its potential to enhance MARL's adaptability across multiple tasks. However, it is challenging for existing multi-task learning methods to handle…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Guobin Zhu , Rui Zhou , Wenkang Ji , Hongyin Zhang , Donglin Wang , Shiyu Zhao

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