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Title: Multitask Soft Option Learning

Paper content:
We present Multitask Soft Option Learning (MSOL), a hierarchical multi-task framework based on Planning-as-Inference.
MSOL extends the concept of Options, using separate variational posteriors for each task, regularized by a shared prior.
The learned soft-options are temporally extended, allowing a higher-level master policy to train faster on new tasks by making decisions with lower frequency.
Additionally, MSOL allows fine-tuning of soft-options for new tasks without unlearning previously useful behavior, and avoids problems with local minima in multitask training.
We demonstrate empirically that MSOL significantly outperforms both hierarchical and flat transfer-learning baselines in challenging multi-task environments.
A key challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is to scale current approaches to higher complexity tasks without requiring a prohibitive number of environmental interactions.
However, for many tasks, it is possible to construct or learn efficient exploration priors that allow to focus on more relevant parts of the state-action space, reducing the number of required interactions.
These include, for example, reward shaping (Ng et al., 1999; Konidaris & Barto, 2006) , curriculum learning (Bengio et al., 2009) , some meta-learning algorithms (Wang et al., 2016; Duan et al., 2016; Gupta et al., 2018; Houthooft et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2018) , and transfer learning (Caruana, 1997; Taylor & Stone, 2011; Bengio, 2012; Parisotto et al., 2015; Rusu et al., 2015; Teh et al., 2017) .
One promising way to capture prior knowledge is to decompose policies into a hierarchy of subpolicies (or skills) that can be reused and combined in novel ways to solve new tasks (Dayan & Hinton, 1993; Thrun & Schwartz, 1995; Parr & Russell, 1998; Sutton et al., 1999; Barto & Mahadevan, 2003) .
The idea of Hierarchical RL (HRL) is also supported by findings that humans appear to employ a hierarchical mental structure when solving tasks (Botvinick et al., 2009; Collins & Frank, 2016) .
In such a hierarchical RL policy, lower-level, temporally extended skills yield directed behavior over multiple time steps.
This has two advantages:
i) it allows efficient exploration, as the target states of skills can be reached without having to explore much of the state space in between, and
ii) directed behavior also reduces the variance of the future reward, which accelerates convergence of estimates thereof.
On the other hand, while a hierarchical approach can therefore significantly speed up exploration and training, it can also severely limit the expressiveness of the final policy and lead to suboptimal performance when the temporally extended skills are not able to express the required policy for the task at hand (Mankowitz et al., 2014) .
Many methods exist for constructing and/or learning skills for particular tasks (Dayan & Hinton, 1993; Sutton et al., 1999; McGovern & Barto, 2001; Menache et al., 2002; Ş imşek & Barto, 2009; Gregor et al., 2016; Kulkarni et al., 2016; Bacon et al., 2017; Nachum et al., 2018a) .
Training on multiple tasks simultaneously is one promising approach to learn skills that are both relevant and generalise across tasks (Thrun & Schwartz, 1995; Pickett & Barto, 2002; Fox et al., 2016; Andreas et al., 2017; Frans et al., 2018) .
Ideally, the entire hierarchy can be trained end-to-end on the obtained return, obviating the need to specify proxy rewards for skills (Frans et al., 2018) .
However, learning hierarchical policies end-to-end in a multitask setting poses two major challenges:
i) because skills optimize environmental rewards directly, correctly updating them relies on already (nearly) converged master policies that use them similarly across all tasks, requiring complex training schedules (Frans et al., 2018) , and
ii) the end-to-end optimization is prone to local minima in which multiple skills have learned similar behavior.
This second points is explained in more detail in Appendix A.
In this paper, we propose Multitask Soft Option Learning (MSOL), a novel approach to learning hierarchical policies in a multi-task setting that extends Options (Sutton et al., 1999) , a common definition for skills, and casts the concept into the Planning as Inference (PAI) framework (see, e.g., Levine, 2018 , for a review).
MSOL brings multiple advantages:
i) it stabilizes end-to-end multitask training, removing the need for complex training schedules like in Frans et al. (2018) ,
ii) it gives rise to coordination between master policies, avoiding local minima of the type described in Appendix A,
iii) it allows fine-tuning of options, i.e. adapting them to new tasks at test-time without the risk of unlearning previously acquired useful behavior, thereby avoiding suboptimal performance due to restricted expressiveness,
iv) and lastly, we show how the soft option framework gives rise to a natural solution to the challenging task of learning option-termination policies.
MSOL differentiates between a prior policy for each option, shared across all tasks, and a flexible task-specific posterior policy.
The option prior can be fixed once it is fully trained, preventing unlearning of useful behavior even when the posteriors are updated.
On new tasks, the option posteriors are initialized to the priors and regularized towards them, but are still adaptable to the specific task.
This allows the same accelerated training as with 'hard' options, but can solve more tasks due to the adjustable posteriors.
Furthermore, during option learning, we can train prior and posterior policies simultaneously (Teh et al., 2017) , all without the need for complex training schedules (Frans et al., 2018) : training is stabilized because only the priors are shared across tasks.
Our experiments demonstrate that MSOL outperforms previous hierarchical and transfer learning algorithms during transfer tasks in a multitask setting.
MSOL only modifies the regularized reward and loss function, but does not require any specialized architecture.
In particular, it also does not require artificial restrictions on the expressiveness of either the higher-level or intra-option policies.
2 PRELIMINARIES An agent's task is formalized as a MDP (S, A, ρ, P, r), consisting of the state space S, the action space A, the initial state distribution ρ, the transition probability P (s t+1 |s t , a t ) of reaching state s t+1 by executing action a t in state s t , and the reward r(s t , a t ) an agent receives for this transition.
Multitask Soft Option Learning (MSOL) proposes reformulating options using the perspective of prior and posterior distributions.
This offers several key advantages.
First, during transfer, it allows us to distinguish between fixed, and therefore knowledge-preserving option priors, and flexible option posteriors that can adjust to the reward structure of the task at hand.
This effects a similar speed-up in learning as the original options framework, while avoiding sub-optimal performance when the available options are not perfectly aligned to the task.
Second, utilizing this 'soft' version of options in a multitask learning setup increases optimization stability and removes the need for complex training schedules between master and lower level policies.
Furthermore, this framework naturally allows master policies to coordinate across tasks and avoid local minima of insufficient option diversity.
It also allows for autonomously learning option-termination policies, a very challenging task which is often avoided by fixing option durations manually.
Lastly, using this formulation also allows inclusion of prior information in a principled manner without imposing too rigid a structure on the resulting hierarchy.
We utilize this advantage to explicitly incorporate the bias that good options should be temporally extended.
In future research, other types of information can be explored.
As an example, one could investigate sets of tasks which would benefit from a learned master prior, like walking on different types of terrain.
Tejas D Kulkarni, Karthik Narasimhan, Ardavan Saeedi, and Josh Tenenbaum.
Hierarchical deep reinforcement learning: Integrating temporal abstraction and intrinsic motivation.
In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 3675-3683, 2016.
where all posteriors of z 1 are moving to A, but for z 2 , the posteriors on different tasks a and b move to different targets.
Crucially, to maximize the regularized reward (6), the KL-divergences between priors and posteriors should be minimized along they trajectories, i.e. weighted by how likely they are to occur.
Consequently, the higher D KL [z 1 is always used to reach A and z 2 (b) is always used to reach B, allowing bothz 1 andz 2 to also lead to A and B respectively.

assistant: text: In Hierarchical RL, we introduce the notion of a 'soft', i.e. adaptable, option and show that this helps learning in multitask settings.