Title
On Efficiency in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Abstract
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches promise to provide more efficient solutions to sequential decision making problems, both in terms of statistical as well as computational efficiency. While this has been demonstrated empirically over time in a variety of tasks, theoretical results quantifying the benefits of such methods are still few and far between. In this paper, we discuss the kind of structure in a Markov decision process which gives rise to efficient HRL methods. Specifically, we formalize the intuition that HRL can exploit well repeating "subMDPs", with similar reward and transition structure. We show that, under reasonable assumptions, a model-based Thompson sampling-style HRL algorithm that exploits this structure is statistically efficient, as established through a finite-time regret bound. We also establish conditions under which planning with structure-induced options is near-optimal and computationally efficient.
Year
Venue
DocType
2020
NIPS 2020
Conference
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
33
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zheng Wen127840.04
Doina Precup22829221.83
Morteza Ibrahimi3495.56
André Barreto4125.65
Benjamin Van Roy51762211.73
Satinder P. Singh65508715.52