Composing Task-Agnostic Policies with Deep Reinforcement Learning
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Abstract (arXiv)
The composition of elementary behaviors to solve challenging transfer learning problems is one of the key elements in building intelligent machines. To date, there has been plenty of work on learning task-specific policies or skills but almost no focus on composing necessary, task-agnostic skills to find a solution to new problems. In this paper, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning-based skill transfer and composition method that takes the agent's primitive policies to solve unseen tasks. We evaluate our method in difficult cases where training policy through standard reinforcement learning (RL) or even hierarchical RL is either not feasible or exhibits high sample complexity. We show that our method not only transfers skills to new problem settings but also solves the challenging environments requiring both task planning and motion control with high data efficiency.
Key facts. Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 25 May 2019.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 5; 2022: 7; 2023: 5; 2024: 0; 2025: 3.
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- 2023METRA: Scalable Unsupervised RL with Metric-Aware Abstractioncited by 80
- 2022Lipschitz-constrained Unsupervised Skill Discoverycited by 60
- 2023Controllability-Aware Unsupervised Skill Discoverycited by 49
- 2021Learning Multimodal Rewards from Rankingscited by 41
- 2021Hierarchical Skills for Efficient Explorationcited by 37
- 2022Intelligent problem-solving as integrated hierarchical reinforcement learningcited by 21
- 2025Skill Expansion and Composition in Parameter Spacecited by 13
- 2022Meta-Learning Parameterized Skillscited by 7
- 2022ASPiRe:Adaptive Skill Priors for Reinforcement Learningcited by 7
- 2021Toward Robust Long Range Policy Transfercited by 6
- 2022Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning for Transferable Manipulation Skill Discoverycited by 5
- 2022Flexible Attention-Based Multi-Policy Fusion for Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
8 more
- 2022Control Transformer: Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments through PRM-Guided Return-Conditioned Sequence Modelingcited by 5
- 2021Learning Multi-Objective Curricula for Robotic Policy Learningcited by 3
- 2021Hierarchical Primitive Composition: Simultaneous Activation of Skills with Inconsistent Action Dimensions in Multiple Hierarchiescited by 2
- 2023A Constrained-Optimization Approach to the Execution of Prioritized Stacks of Learned Multi-Robot Taskscited by 1
- 2023On the Value of Myopic Behavior in Policy Reusecited by 1
- 2025Learning Parameterized Skills from Demonstrationscited by 1
- 2023Policy composition in reinforcement learning via multi-objective policy optimizationcited by 0
- 2025Multimodal LLMs Do Not Compose Skills Optimally Across Modalitiescited by 0
- 2025Multimodal LLMs Do Not Compose Skills Optimally Across Modalities11 Nov 2025
- 2025Learning Parameterized Skills from Demonstrations28 Oct 2025
- 2025Skill Expansion and Composition in Parameter Space9 Feb 2025
- 2023METRA: Scalable Unsupervised RL with Metric-Aware Abstraction13 Oct 2023
- 2023Policy composition in reinforcement learning via multi-objective policy optimization29 Aug 2023
- 2023On the Value of Myopic Behavior in Policy Reuse28 May 2023
- 2023Controllability-Aware Unsupervised Skill Discovery10 Feb 2023
- 2023A Constrained-Optimization Approach to the Execution of Prioritized Stacks of Learned Multi-Robot Tasks13 Jan 2023
- 2022Control Transformer: Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments through PRM-Guided Return-Conditioned Sequence Modeling11 Nov 2022
- 2022Flexible Attention-Based Multi-Policy Fusion for Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning7 Oct 2022
- 2022ASPiRe:Adaptive Skill Priors for Reinforcement Learning30 Sep 2022
- 2022Intelligent problem-solving as integrated hierarchical reinforcement learning18 Aug 2022
8 more
- 2022Meta-Learning Parameterized Skills7 Jun 2022
- 2022Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning for Transferable Manipulation Skill Discovery29 Apr 2022
- 2022Lipschitz-constrained Unsupervised Skill Discovery2 Feb 2022
- 2021Hierarchical Skills for Efficient Exploration20 Oct 2021
- 2021Learning Multi-Objective Curricula for Robotic Policy Learning6 Oct 2021
- 2021Hierarchical Primitive Composition: Simultaneous Activation of Skills with Inconsistent Action Dimensions in Multiple Hierarchies5 Oct 2021
- 2021Learning Multimodal Rewards from Rankings27 Sep 2021
- 2021Toward Robust Long Range Policy Transfer4 Mar 2021
- 2021Learning Multimodal Rewards from Rankingscited by 41
- 2021Learning Multimodal Rewards from Rankings27 Sep 2021
- 2023METRA: Scalable Unsupervised RL with Metric-Aware Abstractioncited by 80
- 2022Lipschitz-constrained Unsupervised Skill Discoverycited by 60
- 2023Controllability-Aware Unsupervised Skill Discoverycited by 49
- 2021Hierarchical Skills for Efficient Explorationcited by 37
- 2022Intelligent problem-solving as integrated hierarchical reinforcement learningcited by 21
- 2025Skill Expansion and Composition in Parameter Spacecited by 13
- 2022Meta-Learning Parameterized Skillscited by 7
- 2022ASPiRe:Adaptive Skill Priors for Reinforcement Learningcited by 7
- 2021Toward Robust Long Range Policy Transfercited by 6
- 2022Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning for Transferable Manipulation Skill Discoverycited by 5
- 2022Flexible Attention-Based Multi-Policy Fusion for Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
- 2022Control Transformer: Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments through PRM-Guided Return-Conditioned Sequence Modelingcited by 5
12 most cited of 18 All 18 (JSON)
- 2025Learning Parameterized Skills from Demonstrations28 Oct 2025
- 2025Skill Expansion and Composition in Parameter Space9 Feb 2025
- 2023METRA: Scalable Unsupervised RL with Metric-Aware Abstraction13 Oct 2023
- 2023Policy composition in reinforcement learning via multi-objective policy optimization29 Aug 2023
- 2023On the Value of Myopic Behavior in Policy Reuse28 May 2023
- 2023Controllability-Aware Unsupervised Skill Discovery10 Feb 2023
- 2023A Constrained-Optimization Approach to the Execution of Prioritized Stacks of Learned Multi-Robot Tasks13 Jan 2023
- 2022Control Transformer: Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments through PRM-Guided Return-Conditioned Sequence Modeling11 Nov 2022
- 2022Flexible Attention-Based Multi-Policy Fusion for Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning7 Oct 2022
- 2022ASPiRe:Adaptive Skill Priors for Reinforcement Learning30 Sep 2022
- 2022Intelligent problem-solving as integrated hierarchical reinforcement learning18 Aug 2022
- 2022Meta-Learning Parameterized Skills7 Jun 2022
12 newest of 18 All 18 (JSON)