Extending Graph-Based Skill Discovery to Continuous State MDPs

Poster A: Monday -- 11:00 - 12:30

Harvey Ayling, Özgür Şimşek, Joshua Benjamin Evans

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Skill Discovery, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, State Abstraction

To solve complex problems with long horizons, intelligent agents must be able to create useful temporally extended actions, also known as skills. Graph-based skill discovery methods identify these behaviours by exploiting the connectivity structure of an environment when modelled as a graph. However, it is unclear how best to construct graphs that represent environments with continuous state spaces, and whether the identified skills would be useful. We present a novel algorithm for constructing abstract state transition graphs in continuous-state environments by clustering states within a temporal distance embedding space. This approach enables the application of any graph-based skill-discovery method. We empirically demonstrate that our framework successfully captures underlying environment connectivity and supports the application of diverse graph-based skill discovery algorithms.