Papers › Learning Goal Embeddings via Self-Play for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Learning Goal Embeddings via Self-Play for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

22 Nov 2018arXiv:1811.09083archive 2025-07-28

Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Emily Denton, Arthur Szlam, Rob Fergus

In hierarchical reinforcement learning a major challenge is determining appropriate low-level policies. We propose an unsupervised learning scheme, based on asymmetric self-play from Sukhbaatar et al. (2018), that automatically learns a good representation of sub-goals in the environment and a low-level policy that can execute them. A high-level policy can then direct the lower one by generating a sequence of continuous sub-goal vectors. We evaluate our model using Mazebase and Mujoco environments, including the challenging AntGather task. Visualizations of the sub-goal embeddings reveal a logical decomposition of tasks within the environment. Quantitatively, our approach obtains compelling performance gains over non-hierarchical approaches.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

ACampero/hsp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tesatory/hsp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Hierarchical Reinforcement LearningMuJoCoReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections