Representation learning for hierarchical reinforcement learning

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has the potential to simplify the solution of environments with long horizons and sparse rewards. The idea behind HRL is to decompose a complex decision-making problem into smaller, manageable sub-problems, allowing an agent to learn more efficiently and eff...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Steccanella, Lorenzo
Tipo de recurso: tesis doctoral
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:CBUC, CESCA
Repositorio:TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red
OAI Identifier:oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/688366
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10803/688366
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Reinforcement learning
Hierarchical reinforcement learning
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning
Representation learning
Options learning
Reward shaping
Sparse-reward environments
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Descripción
Sumario:Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has the potential to simplify the solution of environments with long horizons and sparse rewards. The idea behind HRL is to decompose a complex decision-making problem into smaller, manageable sub-problems, allowing an agent to learn more efficiently and effectively. In this thesis, we aim to contribute to the field of HRL through the study of state space partition representations. We aim to discover representations that allow decomposing a complex state space in a set of small interconnected partitions. We start our work by presenting which are the properties of ideal state space partitions for HRL and then proceed to explore different methods for creating such partitions. We present algorithms able to leverage such representations to learn more effectively in sparse reward settings. Finally, we show how to combine the learned representation with Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) and additionally we present state representations useful for GCRL.