Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Adversarially Guided Subgoals

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) proposes to solve difficult tasks by performing decision-making and control at successively higher levels of temporal abstraction. However, off-policy HRL often suffers from the problem of non-stationary high-level policy since the low-level policy is constantly changing. In this paper, we propose a novel HRL approach for mitigating the non-stationarity by adversarially enforcing the high-level policy to generate subgoals compatible with the current instantiation of the low-level policy. In practice, the adversarial learning is implemented by training a simple discriminator network concurrently with the high-level policy which determines the compatibility level of subgoals. Experiments with state-of-the-art algorithms show that our approach improves both HRL learning efficiency and overall performance in various challenging continuous control tasks.