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arXiv · 2304.03535

CRISP: Curriculum Inducing Primitive Informed Subgoal Prediction for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Utsav Singh·Vinay P. Namboodiri
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Abstract

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) leverages temporal abstraction to efficiently tackle complex long-horizon tasks. However, HRL often collapses because the continual updates of the low-level primitive make earlier sub-goals issued by the high-level policy obsolete, introducing non-stationarity that destabilizes training. We propose CRISP, a curriculum-driven framework that tackles this instability with three key ingredients: (1) primitive-informed parsing (PIP), which adaptively re-labels a handful of expert demonstrations to always generate reachable subgoals by the current low-level primitive, (2) an inverse-reinforcement-learning regularizer that steers the high-level policy toward the expert-induced subgoal distribution and stabilizes learning, and (3) a unified training loop that leverages these components to boost sample efficiency. Across six sparse-reward robotic navigation and manipulation benchmarks, CRISP improves success rates by more than 40% over strong hierarchical and flat baselines and successfully transfers to real-world tasks, demonstrating the promise of curriculum-based HRL for practical scenarios.

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Utsav Singh, Vinay P. Namboodiri. 2023-04-07. CRISP: Curriculum Inducing Primitive Informed Subgoal Prediction for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03535

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