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Latent Space Policies for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Tuomas Haarnoja · Kristian Hartikainen · Pieter Abbeel · Sergey Levine

Wed Jul 11 05:50 AM -- 06:10 AM (PDT) @ A1
in Reinforcement Learning 3 »

We address the problem of learning hierarchical deep neural network policies for reinforcement learning. In contrast to methods that explicitly restrict or cripple lower layers of a hierarchy to force them to use higher-level modulating signals, each layer in our framework is trained to directly solve the task, but acquires a range of diverse strategies via a maximum entropy reinforcement learning objective. Each layer is also augmented with latent random variables, which are sampled from a prior distribution during the training of that layer. The maximum entropy objective causes these latent variables to be incorporated into the layer's policy, and the higher level layer can directly control the behavior of the lower layer through this latent space. Furthermore, by constraining the mapping from latent variables to actions to be invertible, higher layers retain full expressivity: neither the higher layers nor the lower layers are constrained in their behavior. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that we can improve on the performance of single-layer policies on standard benchmark tasks simply by adding additional layers, and that our method can solve more complex sparse-reward tasks by learning higher-level policies on top of high-entropy skills optimized for simple low-level objectives.

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Author Information

Tuomas Haarnoja (UC Berkeley)
Kristian Hartikainen (UC Berkeley)
Pieter Abbeel (OpenAI / UC Berkeley)
Sergey Levine (Berkeley)
Sergey Levine

Sergey Levine received a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2009, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in fall 2016. His work focuses on machine learning for decision making and control, with an emphasis on deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms. Applications of his work include autonomous robots and vehicles, as well as computer vision and graphics. His research includes developing algorithms for end-to-end training of deep neural network policies that combine perception and control, scalable algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning algorithms, and more.

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