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Title: Sub-policy Adaptation for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning is a promising approach to long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards.
Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a higher level that controls the skills in a new task.
Treating the skills as fixed can lead to significant sub-optimality in the transfer setting.
In this work, we propose a novel algorithm to discover a set of skills, and continuously adapt them along with the higher level even when training on a new task.
Our main contributions are two-fold.
First, we derive a new hierarchical policy gradient, as well as an unbiased latent-dependent baseline.
We introduce Hierarchical Proximal Policy Optimization (HiPPO), an on-policy method to efficiently train all levels of the hierarchy simultaneously.
Second, we propose a method of training time-abstractions that improves the robustness of the obtained skills to environment changes.
Code and results are available at sites.google.com/view/hippo-rl.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has made great progress in a variety of domains, from playing games such as Pong and Go BID5 BID20 to automating robotic locomotion BID11 BID20 Florensa et al., 2018b) , dexterous manipulation (Florensa et al., 2017b; BID1 , and perception BID7 Florensa et al., 2018a ).
Yet, most work in RL is still learning a new behavior from scratch when faced with a new problem.
This is particularly inefficient when dealing with tasks that are hard to solve due to sparse rewards or long horizons, or when solving many related tasks.A promising technique to overcome this limitation is Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) BID17 Florensa et al., 2017a) .
In this paradigm, policies have several modules of abstraction, so the reuse of a subset of the modules becomes easier.
The most common case consists of temporal abstraction BID9 Dayan & Hinton, 1993 ), where a higher-level policy (manager) takes actions at a lower frequency, and its actions condition the behavior of some lower level skills or sub-policies.
When transferring knowledge to a new task, most prior works fix the skills and train a new manager on top.
Despite having a clear benefit in kick-starting the learning in the new task, having fixed skills can considerably cap the final performance on the new task (Florensa et al., 2017a) .
Little work has been done on adapting pre-trained sub-policies to be optimal for a new task.In this paper, we develop a new framework for adapting all levels of temporal hierarchies simultaneously.
First, we derive an efficient approximated hierarchical policy gradient.
Our key insight is that, under mild assumptions, the manager's decisions can be considered part of the observation from the perspective of the sub-policies.
This decouples the gradient with respect to the manager and the sub-policies parameters and provides theoretical justification for a technique used in other prior works (Frans et al., 2018) .
Second, we introduce an unbiased sub-policy specific baseline for our hierarchical policy gradient.
Our experiments reveal faster convergence, suggesting efficient gradient variance reduction.
Then we introduce a more stable way of using this gradient, Hierarchical Proximal Policy Optimization (HiPPO).
This helps us take more conservative steps in our policy space BID12 , necessary in hierarchies because of the interdependence of each layer.
Finally we also evaluate the benefit of varying the time-commitment to the sub-policies, and show it helps both in terms of final performance and zero-shot adaptation to similar tasks.
In this paper, we examined how to effectively adapt hierarchical policies.
We began by deriving a hierarchical policy gradient and approximation of it.
We then proposed a new method, HiPPO, that can stably train multiple layers of a hierarchy.
The adaptation experiments suggested that we can optimize pretrained skills for downstream environments, and learn emergent skills without any unsupervised pre-training.
We also explored hierarchy from an information bottleneck point of view, demonstrating that HiPPO with randomized period can learn from scratch on sparsereward and long time horizon tasks, while outperforming non-hierarchical methods on zero-shot transfer.There are many enticing avenues of future work.
For instance, replacing the manually designed bottleneck with a variational autoencoder with an information bottleneck could further improve HiPPO's performance and extend the gains seen here to other tasks.
Also, as HiPPO provides a policy architecture and gradient expression, we could explore using meta-learning on top of it in order to learn better skills that are more useful on a distribution of different tasks.

assistant: text: We propose HiPPO, a stable Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithm that can train several levels of the hierarchy simultaneously, giving good performance both in skill discovery and adaptation.