MENTOR: Guiding Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning With Human Feedback and Dynamic Distance Constraint

Xinglin Zhou, Yifu Yuan, Shaofu Yang, Jianye Hao

Abstract: Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) provides a promising solution for complex tasks with sparse rewards of agents, which uses a hierarchical framework that divides tasks into subgoals and completes them sequentially. However, current methods struggle to find suitable subgoals for ensuring a stable learning process. To address the issue, we propose a general hierarchical reinforcement learning framework incorporating human feedback and dynamic distance constraints, termed MENTOR, which acts as a “mentor”. Specifically, human feedback is incorporated into high-level policy learning to find better subgoals. Furthermore, we propose the Dynamic Distance Constraint (DDC) mechanism dynamically adjusting the space of optional subgoals, such that MENTOR can generate subgoals matching the low-level policy learning process from easy to hard. As a result, the learning efficiency can be improved. As for low-level policy, a dual policy is designed for exploration-exploitation decoupling to stabilize the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MENTOR uses a small amount of human feedback to achieve significant improvement in complex tasks with sparse rewards.

External IDs:dblp:journals/tetci/ZhouYYH25