Subgoal Discovery Using a Free Energy Paradigm and State Aggregations

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Main Authors: Mesbah, Amirhossein, Hosseini, Reshad, Shariatpanahi, Seyed Pooya, Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Mesbah, Amirhossein
Hosseini, Reshad
Shariatpanahi, Seyed Pooya
Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
author_facet Mesbah, Amirhossein
Hosseini, Reshad
Shariatpanahi, Seyed Pooya
Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a major role in solving complex sequential decision-making tasks. Hierarchical and goal-conditioned RL are promising methods for dealing with two major problems in RL, namely sample inefficiency and difficulties in reward shaping. These methods tackle the mentioned problems by decomposing a task into simpler subtasks and temporally abstracting a task in the action space. One of the key components for task decomposition of these methods is subgoal discovery. We can use the subgoal states to define hierarchies of actions and also use them in decomposing complex tasks. Under the assumption that subgoal states are more unpredictable, we propose a free energy paradigm to discover them. This is achieved by using free energy to select between two spaces, the main space and an aggregation space. The $model \; changes$ from neighboring states to a given state shows the unpredictability of a given state, and therefore it is used in this paper for subgoal discovery. Our empirical results on navigation tasks like grid-world environments show that our proposed method can be applied for subgoal discovery without prior knowledge of the task. Our proposed method is also robust to the stochasticity of environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_16687
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Subgoal Discovery Using a Free Energy Paradigm and State Aggregations
Mesbah, Amirhossein
Hosseini, Reshad
Shariatpanahi, Seyed Pooya
Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a major role in solving complex sequential decision-making tasks. Hierarchical and goal-conditioned RL are promising methods for dealing with two major problems in RL, namely sample inefficiency and difficulties in reward shaping. These methods tackle the mentioned problems by decomposing a task into simpler subtasks and temporally abstracting a task in the action space. One of the key components for task decomposition of these methods is subgoal discovery. We can use the subgoal states to define hierarchies of actions and also use them in decomposing complex tasks. Under the assumption that subgoal states are more unpredictable, we propose a free energy paradigm to discover them. This is achieved by using free energy to select between two spaces, the main space and an aggregation space. The $model \; changes$ from neighboring states to a given state shows the unpredictability of a given state, and therefore it is used in this paper for subgoal discovery. Our empirical results on navigation tasks like grid-world environments show that our proposed method can be applied for subgoal discovery without prior knowledge of the task. Our proposed method is also robust to the stochasticity of environments.
title Subgoal Discovery Using a Free Energy Paradigm and State Aggregations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16687