Hierarchical Linearly-Solvable Markov Decision Problems

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 26

Main Track

We present a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that formulates each task in the hierarchy as a special type of Markov decision process for which the Bellman equation is linear and has analytical solution. Problems of this type, called linearly-solvable MDPs (LMDPs) have interesting properties that can be exploited in a hierarchical setting, such as efficient learning of the optimal value function or task compositionality. The proposed hierarchical approach can also be seen as a novel alternative to solving LMDPs with large state spaces. We derive a hierarchical version of the so-called Z-learning algorithm that learns different tasks simultaneously and show empirically that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art learning methods in two classical HRL domains: the taxi domain and an autonomous guided vehicle task.

10.1609/icaps.v26i1.13750