We’ve developed a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm that learns high-level actions useful for solving a range of tasks, allowing fast solving of tasks requiring thousands of timesteps. Our algorithm, when applied to a set of navigation problems, discovers a set of high-level actions for walking and crawling in different directions, which enables the agent to master new navigation tasks quickly.
arXiv:2508. 14751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study goal-conditioned reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with sparse rewards and large, structured goal spaces.
arXiv:2609.07575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces an alternative view of efficient exploration and studies its theoretical and empirical implications in the absence of extrinsic...
The paper reviews hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) as a method for enabling agents to explore, plan, and learn in complex, open-ended environments by uncovering temporal structure in experience streams. It discusses the unclear definition of what makes a structure useful, the benefits of HRL for decision‑making challenges, and its impact on AI agent performance trade‑offs. The authors survey various HRL methods—from online learning to offline datasets and large language model integration—and outline the challenges and suitable domains for temporal structure discovery.
arXiv:2602. 03087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quadruped robots are used for primary searches during the early stages of indoor fires.
arXiv:2608. 02993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: (Flat) Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents face significant challenges in environments with sparse rewards that require long-horizon reasoning.
arXiv:2610.20486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In reinforcement learning, an agent must explore an unknown environment to learn how to make good decisions. Unlike methods that can freely sample any...
arXiv:2605.06639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Recursive Agent Optimization (RAO), a reinforcement learning approach for training recursive agents: agents that can spawn and d...
The paper introduces Q-Shaped Options (QSO), a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that learns action abstractions between consecutive levels using shared encoders shaped by Q functions. QSO employs distinct state-value functions, Q functions, and policies at each hierarchy level, encouraging the low-level Q function to preserve distinctions needed for optimal control while the high-level Q function discards unnecessary distinctions. Experiments on offline goal-conditioned locomotion and manipulation tasks show that QSO learns semantically meaningful option spaces and outperforms baselines, achieving non-zero performance where other algorithms fail.
arXiv:2507. 23604v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods allow for learning scalable multi-agent policies, but suffer from partial observability and induced non-stationarity.
arXiv:2607. 20834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of learning general-purpose policies from static datasets.
Policy Learning with a Language Bottleneck (PLLB) is a framework that lets AI agents generate linguistic rules to describe high‑level strategies. PLLB alternates between rule generation, guided by language models, and policy updates that use these rules, even when a single rule cannot fully capture a complex policy. Experiments on five tasks—including a signaling game, maze navigation, image reconstruction, and robot grasp planning—show that PLLB agents learn more interpretable, generalizable behaviors and can share rules with humans for better coordination.
arXiv:2512. 09706v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The paradigm of agentic AI is shifting from engineered complex workflows to post-training native models.