Paper:
The tasks that an agent will need to solve often aren't known during training. However, if the agent knows which properties of the environment are important, then after learning how its actions affect those properties the agent may be able to use this knowledge to solve complex tasks without training specifically for them. Towards this end, we consider a setup in which an environment is augmented with a set of user defined attributes that parameterize the features of interest. We propose a method that learns a policy for transitioning between "nearby" sets of attributes, and maintains a graph of possible transitions. Given a task at test time that can be expressed in terms of a target set of attributes, and a current state, our model infers the attributes of the current state and searches over paths through attribute space to get a high level plan, and then uses its low level policy to execute the plan. We show in grid-world games and 3D block stacking that our model is able to generalize to longer, more complex tasks at test time even when it only sees short, simple tasks at train time.

Review:
Summary: This paper proposes a method for planning which involves learning to detect high-level subgoals (called "attributes"), learning a transition model between subgoals, and then learning a policy for the low-level transitions between subgoals. The high-level task plan is not learned, but is computed using Dijkstra's algorithm. The benefit of this method (called the "Attribute Planner", or AP) is that it is able to generalize to tasks requiring multi-step plans after only training on tasks requiring single-step plans. The AP is compared against standard A3C baselines across a series of experiments in three different domains, showing impressive performance and demonstrating its generalization capability.
Pros:
- Impressive generalization results on multi-step planning problems.
- Nice combination of model-based planning for the high-level task plan with model-free RL for the low-level actions.
Cons:
- Attributes are handcrafted and pre-specified rather than being learned.
- Rather than learning an actual parameterized high-level transition model, a graph is built up out of experience, which requires a large sample complexity.
- No comparison to other hierarchical RL approaches.
Quality and Clarity:
This is a great paper. It is extremely well written and clear, includes a very thorough literature review (though it should probably also discuss [1]), takes a sensible approach to combining high- and low-level planning, and demonstrates significant improvements over A3C baselines when generalizing to more complex task plans. The experiments and domains seem reasonable (though the block-stacking domain would be more interesting if the action and state spaces weren't discrete) and the analysis is thorough.
While the paper in general is written very clearly, it would be helpful to the reader to include an algorithm for the AP.
Originality and Significance:
I am not an expert in hierarchical RL, but my understanding is that typically hierarchical RL approaches use high-level goals to make the task easier to learn in the first place, such as in tasks with long planning horizons (e.g. Montezuma's Revenge). The present work differs from this in that, as they state, "the goal of the model is to be able to generalize to testing on complex tasks from training on simpler tasks" (pg. 5). Most work I have seen does not explicitly test for this generalization capability, but this paper points out that it is important and worthwhile to test for.
It is difficult to say how much of an improvement this paper is on top of other related hierarchical RL works as there are no comparisons made. I think it would be worthwhile to include a comparison to other hierarchical RL architectures (such as [1] or [2]), as I expect they would perform better than the A3C baselines. I suspect that the AP would still have better generalization capabilities, but it is hard to know without seeing the results. That said, I still think that the contribution of the present paper stands on its own.
[1] Vezhnevets, A. S., Osindero, S., Schaul, T., Heess, N., Jaderberg, M., Silver, D., & Kavukcuoglu, K. (2017). FeUdal Networks for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01161
[2] Kulkarni, T. D., Narasimhan, K. R., Saeedi, A., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2016). Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning: Integrating Temporal Abstraction and Intrinsic Motivation. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.