Reinforcement learning agents that operate in diverse and complex environments can benefit from the structured decomposition of their behavior. Often, this is addressed in the context of hierarchical reinforcement learning, where the aim is to decompose a policy into lower-level primitives or options, and a higher-level meta-policy that triggers the appropriate behaviors for a given situation. However, the meta-policy must still produce appropriate decisions in all states. In this work, we propose a policy design that decomposes into primitives, similarly to hierarchical reinforcement learning, but without a high-level meta-policy. Instead, each primitive can decide for themselves whether they wish to act in the current state. We use an information-theoretic mechanism for enabling this decentralized decision: each primitive chooses how much information it needs about the current state to make a decision and the primitive that requests the most information about the current state acts in the world. The primitives are regularized to use as little information as possible, which leads to natural competition and specialization. We experimentally demonstrate that this policy architecture improves over both flat and hierarchical policies in terms of generalization.
There are a wide variety of hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches. One of the most widely applied HRL framework is the framework (). An option can be thought of as an action that extends over multiple timesteps thus providing the notion of temporal abstraction or subroutines in an MDP. Each option has its own policy (which is followed if the option is selected) and the termination condition (to stop the execution of that option). Many strategies are proposed for discovering options using task-specific hierarchies, such as pre-defined sub-goals , hand-designed features , or diversity-promoting priors . These approaches do not generalize well to new tasks. @cite_1 proposed an approach to learn options in an end-to-end manner by parameterizing the intra-option policy as well as the policy and termination condition for all the options. Eigen-options use the eigenvalues of the Laplacian (for the transition graph induced by the MDP) to derive an intrinsic reward for discovering options as well as learning an intra-option policy.
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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 (, 2000). However, only recently in (, 2017) was a policy gradient theorem derived for online learning of general purpose options in an end to end fashion. In this work, we extend previous work on this topic that only focuses on learning a two-level hierarchy including options and primitive actions to enable learning simultaneously at multiple resolutions in time. We achieve this by considering an arbitrarily deep hierarchy of options where high level temporally extended options are composed of lower level options with finer resolutions in time. We extend results from (, 2017) and derive policy gradient theorems for a deep hierarchy of options. Our proposed hierarchical option-critic architecture is capable of learning internal policies, termination conditions, and hierarchical compositions over options without the need for any intrinsic rewards or subgoals. Our empirical results in both discrete and continuous environments demonstrate the efficiency of our framework.