Compositional Reinforcement Learning from Logical Specifications

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We study the problem of learning control policies for complex tasks given by logical specifications. Recent approaches automatically generate a reward function from a given specification and use a suitable reinforcement learning algorithm to learn a policy that maximizes the expected reward. These approaches, however, scale poorly to complex tasks that require high-level planning. In this work, we develop a compositional learning approach, called DIRL, that interleaves high-level planning and reinforcement learning. First, DIRL encodes the specification as an abstract graph; intuitively, vertices and edges of the graph correspond to regions of the state space and simpler sub-tasks, respectively.