English
Related papers

Related papers: On the benefits of pixel-based hierarchical polici…

200 papers

Deep reinforcement learning provides a promising approach for text-based games in studying natural language communication between humans and artificial agents. However, the generalization still remains a big challenge as the agents depend…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Yunqiu Xu , Meng Fang , Ling Chen , Yali Du , Chengqi Zhang

Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Jan Wöhlke , Felix Schmitt , Herke van Hoof

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

In multi-class classification tasks, like human activity recognition, it is often assumed that classes are separable. In real applications, this assumption becomes strong and generates inconsistencies. Besides, the most commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Aomar Osmani , Massinissa Hamidi , Pegah Alizadeh

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) enables fast adaptation to new testing tasks. Despite recent advancements, it is still challenging to learn performant policies across multiple complex and high-dimensional tasks. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Minjae Cho , Chuangchuang Sun

How does the amount of compute available to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy affect its learning? Can policies using a fixed amount of parameters, still benefit from additional compute? The standard RL framework does not provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Raj Ghugare , Michał Bortkiewicz , Alicja Ziarko , Benjamin Eysenbach

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is a main challenge in reinforcement learning. While hierarchical controllers are an intuitive approach to this problem, current methods often require manual reward shaping, alternating training phases, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Alexander Pashevich , Danijar Hafner , James Davidson , Rahul Sukthankar , Cordelia Schmid

Multi-task learning is a very challenging problem in reinforcement learning. While training multiple tasks jointly allow the policies to share parameters across different tasks, the optimization problem becomes non-trivial: It remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Ruihan Yang , Huazhe Xu , Yi Wu , Xiaolong Wang

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) can accelerate long-horizon decision-making by temporally abstracting a policy into multiple levels. Promising results in sparse reward environments have been seen with skills, i.e. sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Ce Hao , Catherine Weaver , Chen Tang , Kenta Kawamoto , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

In complex manipulation scenarios (e.g. tasks requiring complex interaction of two hands or in-hand manipulation), generalization is a hard problem. Current methods still either require a substantial amount of (supervised) training data and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-08-15 Simon Hangl , Emre Ugur , Sandor Szedmak , Justus Piater

Learning long-range behaviors on complex high-dimensional agents is a fundamental problem in robot learning. For such tasks, we argue that transferring learned information from a morphologically simpler agent can massively improve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Donald J. Hejna , Pieter Abbeel , Lerrel Pinto

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

Humans can master a new task within a few trials by drawing upon skills acquired through prior experience. To mimic this capability, hierarchical models combining primitive policies learned from prior tasks have been proposed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Wei-Cheng Tseng , Jin-Siang Lin , Yao-Min Feng , Min Sun

Legged locomotion is a challenging task for learning algorithms, especially when the task requires a diverse set of primitive behaviors. To solve these problems, we introduce a hierarchical framework to automatically decompose complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-23 Deepali Jain , Atil Iscen , Ken Caluwaerts

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

Legged robots navigating crowded scenes and complex terrains in the real world are required to execute dynamic leg movements while processing visual input for obstacle avoidance and path planning. We show that a quadruped robot can acquire…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Deepali Jain , Atil Iscen , Ken Caluwaerts

We study the problem of learning a good set of policies, so that when combined together, they can solve a wide variety of unseen reinforcement learning tasks with no or very little new data. Specifically, we consider the framework of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Safa Alver , Doina Precup

Achieving safe and coordinated behavior in dynamic, constraint-rich environments remains a major challenge for learning-based control. Pure end-to-end learning often suffers from poor sample efficiency and limited reliability, while…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-10 Max Studt , Georg Schildbach

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly used in autonomous driving (AD) and shows clear advantages. However, most RL-based AD methods overlook policy structure design. An RL policy that only outputs short-timescale vehicle control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Guizhe Jin , Zhuoren Li , Bo Leng , Ran Yu , Lu Xiong , Chen Sun

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yasir Zubayr Barlas , Kizito Salako