Tasks with complex temporal structures and long horizons pose a challenge for reinforcement learning agents due to the difficulty in specifying the tasks in terms of reward functions as well as large variances in the learning signals. We propose to address these problems by combining temporal logic (TL) with reinforcement learning from demonstrations. Our method automatically generates intrinsic rewards that align with the overall task goal given a TL task specification. The policy resulting from our framework has an interpretable and hierarchical structure. We validate the proposed method experimentally on a set of robotic manipulation tasks.
Policy task sketches have been used to decompose a complex task to a set of sub-tasks @cite_13 @cite_1 . However, these methods only support sequential execution of the subtasks whereas our approach is able to compose subtasks in any temporal logical relationships. Moreover, given the specification of the task in syntactically co-safe truncated linear temporal logic (scTLTL), our method does not require specification of each subtask in terms of reward functions.
@cite_1 @cite_13
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We describe a framework for multitask deep reinforcement learning guided by policy sketches. Sketches annotate each task with a sequence of named subtasks, providing high-level structural relationships among tasks, but not providing the detailed guidance required by previous work on learning policy abstractions for RL (e.g. intermediate rewards, subtask completion signals, or intrinsic motivations). Our approach associates every subtask with its own modular subpolicy, and jointly optimizes over full task-specific policies by tying parameters across shared subpolicies. This optimization is accomplished via a simple decoupled actor–critic training objective that facilitates learning common behaviors from dissimilar reward functions. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a maze navigation game and a 2-D Minecraft-inspired crafting game. Both games feature extremely sparse rewards that can be obtained only after completing a number of high-level subgoals (e.g. escaping from a sequence of locked rooms or collecting and combining various ingredients in the proper order). Experiments illustrate two main advantages of our approach. First, we outperform standard baselines that learn task-specific or shared monolithic policies. Second, our method naturally induces a library of primitive behaviors that can be recombined to rapidly acquire policies for new tasks. We describe a framework for multitask deep reinforcement learning guided by policy sketches. Sketches annotate each task with a sequence of named subtasks, providing high-level structural relationships among tasks, but not providing the detailed guidance required by previous work on learning policy abstractions for RL (e.g. intermediate rewards, subtask completion signals, or intrinsic motivations). Our approach associates every subtask with its own modular subpolicy, and jointly optimizes over full task-specific policies by tying parameters across shared subpolicies. This optimization is accomplished via a simple decoupled actor-critic training objective that facilitates learning common behaviors from dissimilar reward functions. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a maze navigation game and a 2-D Minecraft-inspired crafting game. Both games feature extremely sparse rewards that can be obtained only after completing a number of high-level subgoals (e.g. escaping from a sequence of locked rooms or collecting and combining various ingredients in the proper order). Experiments illustrate two main advantages of our approach. First, we outperform standard baselines that learn task-specific or shared monolithic policies. Second, our method naturally induces a library of primitive behaviors that can be recombined to rapidly acquire policies for new tasks. This paper presents a new approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning based on decomposing the target Markov decision process (MDP) into a hierarchy of smaller MDPs and decomposing the value function of the target MDP into an additive combination of the value functions of the smaller MDPs. The decomposition, known as the MAXQ decomposition, has both a procedural semantics--as a subroutine hierarchy--and a declarative semantics--as a representation of the value function of a hierarchical policy. MAXQ unifies and extends previous work on hierarchical reinforcement learning by Singh, Kaelbling, and Dayan and Hinton. It is based on the assumption that the programmer can identify useful subgoals and define subtasks that achieve these subgoals. By defining such subgoals, the programmer constrains the set of policies that need to be considered during reinforcement learning. The MAXQ value function decomposition can represent the value function of any policy that is consistent with the given hierarchy. The decomposition also creates opportunities to exploit state abstractions, so that individual MDPs within the hierarchy can ignore large parts of the state space. This is important for the practical application of the method. This paper defines the MAXQ hierarchy, proves formal results on its representational power, and establishes five conditions for the safe use of state abstractions. The paper presents an online model-free learning algorithm, MAXQ-Q, and proves that it converges with probability 1 to a kind of locally-optimal policy known as a recursively optimal policy, even in the presence of the five kinds of state abstraction. The paper evaluates the MAXQ representation and MAXQ-Q through a series of experiments in three domains and shows experimentally that MAXQ-Q (with state abstractions) converges to a recursively optimal policy much faster than flat Q learning. The fact that MAXQ learns a representation of the value function has an important benefit: it makes it possible to compute and execute an improved, non-hierarchical policy via a procedure similar to the policy improvement step of policy iteration. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of this nonhierarchical execution experimentally. Finally, the paper concludes with a comparison to related work and a discussion of the design tradeoffs in hierarchical reinforcement learning. Different task models have been proposed to represent the parallel structure of real-time tasks executing on manycore platforms: fork join, synchronous parallel, DAG-based, etc. Despite different schedulability tests and resource augmentation bounds are available for these task systems, we experience difficulties in applying such results to real application scenarios, where the execution flow of parallel tasks is characterized by multiple (and nested) conditional structures. When a conditional branch drives the number and size of sub-jobs to spawn, it is hard to decide which execution path to select for modeling the worst-case scenario. To circumvent this problem, we integrate control flow information in the task model, considering conditional parallel tasks (cp-tasks) represented by DAGs composed of both precedence and conditional edges. For this task model, we identify meaningful parameters that characterize the schedulability of the system, and derive efficient algorithms to compute them. A response time analysis based on these parameters is then presented for different scheduling policies. A set of simulations shows that the proposed approach allows efficiently checking the schedulability of the addressed systems, and that it significantly tightens the schedulability analysis of non-conditional (e.g., Classic DAG) tasks over existing approaches.