Addressing Long-Horizon Tasks by Integrating Program Synthesis and State Machines

Deep reinforcement learning excels in various domains but lacks generalizability and interoperability. Programmatic RL methods (Trivedi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023) reformulate solving RL tasks as synthesizing interpretable programs that can be executed in the environments. Despite encouraging results, these methods are limited to short-horizon tasks. On the other hand, representing RL policies using state machines (Inala et al., 2020) can inductively generalize to long-horizon tasks; however, it struggles to scale up to acquire diverse and complex behaviors. This work proposes Program Machine Policies (POMPs), which bridge the advantages of programmatic RL and state machine policies, allowing for the representation of complex behaviors and the address of long-term tasks. Specifically, we introduce a method that can retrieve a set of effective, diverse, compatible programs. Then, we use these programs as modes of a state machine and learn a transition function to transition among mode programs, allowing for capturing long-horizon repetitive behaviors. Our proposed framework outperforms programmatic RL and deep RL baselines on various tasks and demonstrates the ability to generalize to even longer horizons without any fine-tuning inductively. Ablation studies justify the effectiveness of our proposed search algorithm for retrieving a set of programs as modes.

Hierarchical Programmatic Reinforcement Learning via Learning to Compose Programs

Aiming to produce reinforcement learning (RL) policies that are human-interpretable and can generalize better to novel scenarios, Trivedi et al. (2021) present a method (LEAPS) that first learns a program embedding space to continuously parameterize diverse programs from a pre-generated program dataset, and then searches for a task-solving program in the learned program embedding space when given a task. Despite encouraging results, the program policies that LEAPS can produce are limited by the distribution of the program dataset. Furthermore, during searching, LEAPS evaluates each candidate program solely based on its return, failing to precisely reward correct parts of programs and penalize incorrect parts. To address these issues, we propose to learn a meta-policy that composes a series of programs sampled from the learned program embedding space. By composing programs, our proposed method can produce program policies that describe out-of-distributionally complex behaviors and directly assign credits to programs that induce desired behaviors. We design and conduct extensive experiments in the Karel domain. The experimental results show that our proposed framework outperforms baselines. The ablation studies confirm the limitations of LEAPS and justify our design choices.