Consciousness-Inspired Spatio-Temporal Abstractions for Better Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

Published: 16 Jan 2024, Last Modified: 30 May 2024ICLR 2024 posterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
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Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Planning, Neural Networks, Temporal Difference Learning, Generalization, Deep Reinforcement Learning
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TL;DR: Planning for better generalization by using abstraction in both space and time
Abstract: Inspired by human conscious planning, we propose Skipper, a model-based reinforcement learning framework utilizing spatio-temporal abstractions to generalize better in novel situations. It automatically decomposes the given task into smaller, more manageable subtasks, and thus enables sparse decision-making and focused computation on the relevant parts of the environment. The decomposition relies on the extraction of an abstracted proxy problem represented as a directed graph, in which vertices and edges are learned end-to-end from hindsight. Our theoretical analyses provide performance guarantees under appropriate assumptions and establish where our approach is expected to be helpful. Generalization-focused experiments validate Skipper’s significant advantage in zero-shot generalization, compared to some existing state-of-the-art hierarchical planning methods.
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Primary Area: reinforcement learning
Submission Number: 1388
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