Identifying Selections for Unsupervised Subtask Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Qiu, Yiwen, Zheng, Yujia, Zhang, Kun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Qiu, Yiwen
Zheng, Yujia
Zhang, Kun
author_facet Qiu, Yiwen
Zheng, Yujia
Zhang, Kun
contents When solving long-horizon tasks, it is intriguing to decompose the high-level task into subtasks. Decomposing experiences into reusable subtasks can improve data efficiency, accelerate policy generalization, and in general provide promising solutions to multi-task reinforcement learning and imitation learning problems. However, the concept of subtasks is not sufficiently understood and modeled yet, and existing works often overlook the true structure of the data generation process: subtasks are the results of a $\textit{selection}$ mechanism on actions, rather than possible underlying confounders or intermediates. Specifically, we provide a theory to identify, and experiments to verify the existence of selection variables in such data. These selections serve as subgoals that indicate subtasks and guide policy. In light of this idea, we develop a sequential non-negative matrix factorization (seq- NMF) method to learn these subgoals and extract meaningful behavior patterns as subtasks. Our empirical results on a challenging Kitchen environment demonstrate that the learned subtasks effectively enhance the generalization to new tasks in multi-task imitation learning scenarios. The codes are provided at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Identifying\_Selections\_for\_Unsupervised\_Subtask\_Discovery/README.md.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21616
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying Selections for Unsupervised Subtask Discovery
Qiu, Yiwen
Zheng, Yujia
Zhang, Kun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
When solving long-horizon tasks, it is intriguing to decompose the high-level task into subtasks. Decomposing experiences into reusable subtasks can improve data efficiency, accelerate policy generalization, and in general provide promising solutions to multi-task reinforcement learning and imitation learning problems. However, the concept of subtasks is not sufficiently understood and modeled yet, and existing works often overlook the true structure of the data generation process: subtasks are the results of a $\textit{selection}$ mechanism on actions, rather than possible underlying confounders or intermediates. Specifically, we provide a theory to identify, and experiments to verify the existence of selection variables in such data. These selections serve as subgoals that indicate subtasks and guide policy. In light of this idea, we develop a sequential non-negative matrix factorization (seq- NMF) method to learn these subgoals and extract meaningful behavior patterns as subtasks. Our empirical results on a challenging Kitchen environment demonstrate that the learned subtasks effectively enhance the generalization to new tasks in multi-task imitation learning scenarios. The codes are provided at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Identifying\_Selections\_for\_Unsupervised\_Subtask\_Discovery/README.md.
title Identifying Selections for Unsupervised Subtask Discovery
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21616