Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Automatically Learning to
  Compose Subtasks
Shuai Han Mehdi Dastani Shihan Wang
Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL),
especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches
have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned
reward structures whose integrations in the RL algorithms are claimed to
significantly improve the learning efficiency. Manually designed reward
structures can suffer from inaccuracy and existing automatically learning
methods are often computationally intractable for complex tasks. The
integration of inaccurate or partial reward structures in RL algorithms fail to
learn optimal policies. In this work, we propose an RL algorithm that can
automatically structure the reward function for sample efficiency, given a set
of labels that signify subtasks. Given such minimal knowledge about the task,
we train a high-level policy that selects optimal sub-tasks in each state
together with a low-level policy that efficiently learns to complete each
sub-task. We evaluate our algorithm in a variety of sparse-reward environments.
The experiment results show that our approach significantly outperforms the
state-of-art baselines as the difficulty of the task increases.