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A master's thesis from Aalborg University
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Solving Complex Problems with Deep Multi-Level Skill Hierarchies

Term

4. term

Education

Publication year

2021

Submitted on

Pages

9

Abstract

The notion of using pre-trained skills to reduce training time and to facilitate lifelong learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been around for a long time. However, the number of skills required to work in an environment goes up as the amount of tasks in the environment increases. As a consequence, the complexity of the action space increases and agents will need to train for longer in order to conquer all tasks. In this paper we propose a framework for Deep Multi-Level Skill Hierarchies (D-MuLSH) as a solution to this problem. This framework is an extended version of the Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Network (H-DRLN) that adds the ability to arrange the skill hierarchy with multiple levels. Simple skills are grouped into complex categories, by use of pre-trained Major Skill Networks (MSN), and agents only need to learn when to use each category, rather than learn when to use each individual skill. We show that D-MuLSH improves training time in the ViZDoom environment compared to the H-DRLN.