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arXiv · 2501.12668

NBDI: A Simple and Effective Termination Condition for Skill Extraction from Task-Agnostic Demonstrations

Myunsoo Kim·Hayeong Lee·Seong-Woong Shim·JunHo Seo·Byung-Jun Lee
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Abstract

Intelligent agents are able to make decisions based on different levels of granularity and duration. Recent advances in skill learning enabled the agent to solve complex, long-horizon tasks by effectively guiding the agent in choosing appropriate skills. However, the practice of using fixed-length skills can easily result in skipping valuable decision points, which ultimately limits the potential for further exploration and faster policy learning. In this work, we propose to learn a simple and effective termination condition that identifies decision points through a state-action novelty module that leverages agent experience data. Our approach, Novelty-based Decision Point Identification (NBDI), outperforms previous baselines in complex, long-horizon tasks, and remains effective even in the presence of significant variations in the environment configurations of downstream tasks, highlighting the importance of decision point identification in skill learning.

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Myunsoo Kim, Hayeong Lee, Seong-Woong Shim, JunHo Seo, Byung-Jun Lee. 2025-01-22. NBDI: A Simple and Effective Termination Condition for Skill Extraction from Task-Agnostic Demonstrations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12668

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