A tale of two goals: leveraging sequentiality in multi-goal scenarios

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Serris, Olivier, Doncieux, Stéphane, Sigaud, Olivier
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Serris, Olivier
Doncieux, Stéphane
Sigaud, Olivier
author_facet Serris, Olivier
Doncieux, Stéphane
Sigaud, Olivier
contents Several hierarchical reinforcement learning methods leverage planning to create a graph or sequences of intermediate goals, guiding a lower-level goal-conditioned (GC) policy to reach some final goals. The low-level policy is typically conditioned on the current goal, with the aim of reaching it as quickly as possible. However, this approach can fail when an intermediate goal can be reached in multiple ways, some of which may make it impossible to continue toward subsequent goals. To address this issue, we introduce two instances of Markov Decision Process (MDP) where the optimization objective favors policies that not only reach the current goal but also subsequent ones. In the first, the agent is conditioned on both the current and final goals, while in the second, it is conditioned on the next two goals in the sequence. We conduct a series of experiments on navigation and pole-balancing tasks in which sequences of intermediate goals are given. By evaluating policies trained with TD3+HER on both the standard GC-MDP and our proposed MDPs, we show that, in most cases, conditioning on the next two goals improves stability and sample efficiency over other approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_21677
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A tale of two goals: leveraging sequentiality in multi-goal scenarios
Serris, Olivier
Doncieux, Stéphane
Sigaud, Olivier
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
68T40
Several hierarchical reinforcement learning methods leverage planning to create a graph or sequences of intermediate goals, guiding a lower-level goal-conditioned (GC) policy to reach some final goals. The low-level policy is typically conditioned on the current goal, with the aim of reaching it as quickly as possible. However, this approach can fail when an intermediate goal can be reached in multiple ways, some of which may make it impossible to continue toward subsequent goals. To address this issue, we introduce two instances of Markov Decision Process (MDP) where the optimization objective favors policies that not only reach the current goal but also subsequent ones. In the first, the agent is conditioned on both the current and final goals, while in the second, it is conditioned on the next two goals in the sequence. We conduct a series of experiments on navigation and pole-balancing tasks in which sequences of intermediate goals are given. By evaluating policies trained with TD3+HER on both the standard GC-MDP and our proposed MDPs, we show that, in most cases, conditioning on the next two goals improves stability and sample efficiency over other approaches.
title A tale of two goals: leveraging sequentiality in multi-goal scenarios
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
68T40
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21677