Hypothesis-Driven Skill Discovery for Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning

Understand

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is capable of learning high-performing policies on a variety of complex high-dimensional tasks, ranging from video games to robotic manipulation.

• However, standard DRL methods often suffer from poor sample efficiency, partially because they aim to be entirely problem-agnostic.
• In this work, we introduce a novel approach to exploration and hierarchical skill learning that derives its sample efficiency from intuitive assumptions it makes about the behavior of objects both in the physical world and simulations which mimic physics.
• Specifically, we propose the Hypothesis Proposal and Evaluation (HyPE) algorithm, which discovers objects from raw pixel data, generates hypotheses about the controllability of observed changes in object state, and learns a hierarchy of skills to test these hypotheses.