Hierarchical Decision Making Based on Structural Information Principles

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zeng, Xianghua, Peng, Hao, Su, Dingli, Li, Angsheng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Zeng, Xianghua
Peng, Hao
Su, Dingli
Li, Angsheng
author_facet Zeng, Xianghua
Peng, Hao
Su, Dingli
Li, Angsheng
contents Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach for managing task complexity across multiple levels of abstraction and accelerating long-horizon agent exploration. However, the effectiveness of hierarchical policies heavily depends on prior knowledge and manual assumptions about skill definitions and task decomposition. In this paper, we propose a novel Structural Information principles-based framework, namely SIDM, for hierarchical Decision Making in both single-agent and multi-agent scenarios. Central to our work is the utilization of structural information embedded in the decision-making process to adaptively and dynamically discover and learn hierarchical policies through environmental abstractions. Specifically, we present an abstraction mechanism that processes historical state-action trajectories to construct abstract representations of states and actions. We define and optimize directed structural entropy, a metric quantifying the uncertainty in transition dynamics between abstract states, to discover skills that capture key transition patterns in RL environments. Building on these findings, we develop a skill-based learning method for single-agent scenarios and a role-based collaboration method for multi-agent scenarios, both of which can flexibly integrate various underlying algorithms for enhanced performance. Extensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and stability of policy learning by up to 32.70%, 64.86%, and 88.26%, respectively, as measured by average rewards, convergence timesteps, and standard deviations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_09760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Decision Making Based on Structural Information Principles
Zeng, Xianghua
Peng, Hao
Su, Dingli
Li, Angsheng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach for managing task complexity across multiple levels of abstraction and accelerating long-horizon agent exploration. However, the effectiveness of hierarchical policies heavily depends on prior knowledge and manual assumptions about skill definitions and task decomposition. In this paper, we propose a novel Structural Information principles-based framework, namely SIDM, for hierarchical Decision Making in both single-agent and multi-agent scenarios. Central to our work is the utilization of structural information embedded in the decision-making process to adaptively and dynamically discover and learn hierarchical policies through environmental abstractions. Specifically, we present an abstraction mechanism that processes historical state-action trajectories to construct abstract representations of states and actions. We define and optimize directed structural entropy, a metric quantifying the uncertainty in transition dynamics between abstract states, to discover skills that capture key transition patterns in RL environments. Building on these findings, we develop a skill-based learning method for single-agent scenarios and a role-based collaboration method for multi-agent scenarios, both of which can flexibly integrate various underlying algorithms for enhanced performance. Extensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and stability of policy learning by up to 32.70%, 64.86%, and 88.26%, respectively, as measured by average rewards, convergence timesteps, and standard deviations.
title Hierarchical Decision Making Based on Structural Information Principles
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09760