PEAR: Primitive Enabled Adaptive Relabeling for Boosting Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Utsav Singh, Vinay P. Namboodiri

Track: full paper

Keywords: Hierarchical reinforcement learning, Learning from demonstrations

TL;DR: We effectively leverage expert demonstrations using our adaptive relabeling based approach to deal with non-stationarity in the context of hierarchical reinforcement learning.

Abstract: Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has the potential to solve complex long horizon tasks using temporal abstraction and increased exploration. However, hierarchical agents are difficult to train due to inherent non-stationarity. We present primitive enabled adaptive relabeling (PEAR), a two-phase approach where we first perform adaptive relabeling on a few expert demonstrations to generate efficient subgoal supervision, and then jointly optimize HRL agents by employing reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL). We perform theoretical analysis to bound the sub-optimality of our approach and derive a joint optimization framework using RL and IL. Since PEAR utilizes only a few expert demonstrations and considers minimal limiting assumptions on the task structure, it can be easily integrated with typical off-policy RL algorithms to produce a practical HRL approach. We perform extensive experiments on challenging environments and show that PEAR is able to outperform various hierarchical and non-hierarchical baselines and achieve upto 80% success rates in complex sparse robotic control tasks where other baselines typically fail to show significant progress. We also perform ablations to thoroughly analyze the importance of our various design choices. Finally, we perform real world robotic experiments on complex tasks and demonstrate that PEAR consistently outperforms the baselines.

Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.

Presenter: ~Utsav_Singh1

Format: Yes, the presenting author will attend in person if this work is accepted to the workshop.

Funding: Yes, the presenting author of this submission falls under ICLR’s funding aims, and funding availability would significantly influence their ability to attend the workshop in person.

Submission Number: 3