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Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

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

In the quest for efficient and robust reinforcement learning methods, both model-free and model-based approaches offer advantages. In this paper we propose a new way of explicitly bridging both approaches via a shared low-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Vincent François-Lavet , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

Many real-world control problems involve both discrete decision variables - such as the choice of control modes, gear switching or digital outputs - as well as continuous decision variables - such as velocity setpoints, control gains or…

When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Mattijs Baert , Pietro Mazzaglia , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

Deep reinforcement learning has shown remarkable success in the past few years. Highly complex sequential decision making problems from game playing and robotics have been solved with deep model-free methods. Unfortunately, the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Aske Plaat , Walter Kosters , Mike Preuss

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is well-suitedd for solving complex tasks by breaking them down into structured policies. However, HRL agents often struggle with efficient exploration and quick adaptation. To overcome these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Arash Khajooeinejad , Fatemeh Sadat Masoumi , Masoumeh Chapariniya

This paper introduces MANGO (Multilayer Abstraction for Nested Generation of Options), a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework designed to address the challenges of long-term sparse reward environments. MANGO decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Alessio Arcudi , Davide Sartor , Alberto Sinigaglia , Vincent François-Lavet , Gian Antonio Susto

Inspired by human conscious planning, we propose Skipper, a model-based reinforcement learning framework utilizing spatio-temporal abstractions to generalize better in novel situations. It automatically decomposes the given task into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Mingde Zhao , Safa Alver , Harm van Seijen , Romain Laroche , Doina Precup , Yoshua Bengio

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

The ability to plan at many different levels of abstraction enables agents to envision the long-term repercussions of their decisions and thus enables sample-efficient learning. This becomes particularly beneficial in complex environments…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Thomas Jiralerspong , Flemming Kondrup , Doina Precup , Khimya Khetarpal

Building systems that autonomously create temporal abstractions from data is a key challenge in scaling learning and planning in reinforcement learning. One popular approach for addressing this challenge is the options framework (Sutton et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Matthew Riemer , Miao Liu , Gerald Tesauro

Automatic data abstraction is an important capability for both benchmarking machine intelligence and supporting summarization applications. In the former one asks whether a machine can `understand' enough about the meaning of input data to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Umar Riaz Muhammad , Yongxin Yang , Timothy M. Hospedales , Tao Xiang , Yi-Zhe Song

Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Lucas Lehnert , Michael J. Frank , Michael L. Littman

Modern listwise recommendation systems need to consider both long-term user perceptions and short-term interest shifts. Reinforcement learning can be applied on recommendation to study such a problem but is also subject to large search…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Luo Ji , Gao Liu , Mingyang Yin , Hongxia Yang , Jingren Zhou

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Anand Kamat , Doina Precup

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of-the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Robert Tjarko Lange , Aldo Faisal

We present a novel method for learning hierarchical abstractions that prioritize competing objectives, leading to improved global expected rewards. Our approach employs a secondary rewarding agent with multiple scalar outputs, each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Tofara Moyo