Compositional Reinforcement Learning from Logical Specifications

Kishor Jothimurugan, Suguman Bansal, Osbert Bastani, Rajeev Alur

Keywords: reinforcement learning, options, temporal specifications, hierarchical learning

Abstract: We study the problem of learning control policies for complex tasks given by logical specifications. Recent approaches automatically generate a reward function from a given specification and use a suitable reinforcement learning algorithm to learn a policy that maximizes the expected reward. These approaches, however, scale poorly to complex tasks that require high-level planning. In this work, we develop a compositional learning approach, called DIRL, that interleaves high-level planning and reinforcement learning. First, DIRL encodes the specification as an abstract graph; intuitively, vertices and edges of the graph correspond to regions of the state space and simpler sub-tasks, respectively. Our approach then incorporates reinforcement learning to learn neural network policies for each edge (sub-task) within a Dijkstra-style planning algorithm to compute a high-level plan in the graph. An evaluation of the proposed approach on a set of challenging control benchmarks with continuous state and action spaces demonstrates that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

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Code: https://github.com/keyshor/dirl

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2106.13906/code)