{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-from-trajectories-via-subgoal-1","title":"Learning from Trajectories via Subgoal Discovery","arxiv_id":"1911.07224","date":"2019-11-03","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2019 12","authors":["Sujoy Paul","Jeroen van Baar","Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury"],"abstract":"Learning to solve complex goal-oriented tasks with sparse terminal-only rewards often requires an enormous number of samples. In such cases, using a set of expert trajectories could help to learn faster. However, Imitation Learning (IL) via supervised pre-training with these trajectories may not perform as well and generally requires additional finetuning with expert-in-the-loop. In this paper, we propose an approach which uses the expert trajectories and learns to decompose the complex main task into smaller sub-goals. We learn a function which partitions the state-space into sub-goals, which can then be used to design an extrinsic reward function. We follow a strategy where the agent first learns from the trajectories using IL and then switches to Reinforcement Learning (RL) using the identified sub-goals, to alleviate the errors in the IL step. To deal with states which are under-represented by the trajectory set, we also learn a function to modulate the sub-goal predictions. We show that our method is able to solve complex goal-oriented tasks, which other RL, IL or their combinations in literature are not able to solve.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.07224v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.07224v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-from-trajectories-via-subgoal-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/sujoyp/subgoal-discovery","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"imitation-learning","task_name":"Imitation Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1911.07224","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}