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Main Authors: Hakenes, Simon, Glasmachers, Tobias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18300
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author Hakenes, Simon
Glasmachers, Tobias
author_facet Hakenes, Simon
Glasmachers, Tobias
contents This paper addresses the challenge of navigation in large, visually complex environments with sparse rewards. We propose a method that uses object-oriented macro actions grounded in a topological map, allowing a simple Deep Q-Network (DQN) to learn effective navigation policies. The agent builds a map by detecting objects from RGBD input and selecting discrete macro actions that correspond to navigating to these objects. This abstraction drastically reduces the complexity of the underlying reinforcement learning problem and enables generalization to unseen environments. We evaluate our approach in a photorealistic 3D simulation and show that it significantly outperforms a random baseline under both immediate and terminal reward conditions. Our results demonstrate that topological structure and macro-level abstraction can enable sample-efficient learning even from pixel data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_18300
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Navigation with Macro Actions and Topological Maps
Hakenes, Simon
Glasmachers, Tobias
Machine Learning
This paper addresses the challenge of navigation in large, visually complex environments with sparse rewards. We propose a method that uses object-oriented macro actions grounded in a topological map, allowing a simple Deep Q-Network (DQN) to learn effective navigation policies. The agent builds a map by detecting objects from RGBD input and selecting discrete macro actions that correspond to navigating to these objects. This abstraction drastically reduces the complexity of the underlying reinforcement learning problem and enables generalization to unseen environments. We evaluate our approach in a photorealistic 3D simulation and show that it significantly outperforms a random baseline under both immediate and terminal reward conditions. Our results demonstrate that topological structure and macro-level abstraction can enable sample-efficient learning even from pixel data.
title Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Navigation with Macro Actions and Topological Maps
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18300