Hierarchical Meta Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Task Environments

Dongyang Zhao, Yue Huang, Changnan Xiao, Yue Li, Shihong Deng

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-task, Hierarchical, Meta Learning

Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning algorithms aim to achieve human-level intelligence by solving practical decisions-making problems, which are often composed of multiple sub-tasks. Complex and subtle relationships between sub-tasks make traditional methods hard to give a promising solution. We implement a first-person shooting environment with random spatial structures to illustrate a typical representative of this kind. A desirable agent should be capable of balancing between different sub-tasks: navigation to find enemies and shooting to kill them. To address the problem brought by the environment, we propose a Meta Soft Hierarchical reinforcement learning framework (MeSH), in which each low-level sub-policy focuses on a specific sub-task respectively and high-level policy automatically learns to utilize low-level sub-policies through meta-gradients. The proposed framework is able to disentangle multiple sub-tasks and discover proper low-level policies under different situations. The effectiveness and efficiency of the framework are shown by a series of comparison experiments. Both environment and algorithm code will be provided for open source to encourage further research.

One-sentence Summary: A new multi-task environment & a hierarchical meta reinforcement learning framework

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