Papers › Unsupervised Learning of Temporal Abstractions with Slot-based Transformers

Unsupervised Learning of Temporal Abstractions with Slot-based Transformers

25 Mar 2022arXiv:2203.13573archive 2025-07-28

Anand Gopalakrishnan, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Sjoerd van Steenkiste

The discovery of reusable sub-routines simplifies decision-making and planning in complex reinforcement learning problems. Previous approaches propose to learn such temporal abstractions in a purely unsupervised fashion through observing state-action trajectories gathered from executing a policy. However, a current limitation is that they process each trajectory in an entirely sequential manner, which prevents them from revising earlier decisions about sub-routine boundary points in light of new incoming information. In this work we propose SloTTAr, a fully parallel approach that integrates sequence processing Transformers with a Slot Attention module and adaptive computation for learning about the number of such sub-routines in an unsupervised fashion. We demonstrate how SloTTAr is capable of outperforming strong baselines in terms of boundary point discovery, even for sequences containing variable amounts of sub-routines, while being up to 7x faster to train on existing benchmarks.

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