Concurrent hierarchical reinforcement learning for robocup keepaway

Abstract

RoboCup Keepaway, originated from the RoboCup soccer simulation 2D challenge, has been widely used as a machine learning benchmark. In this paper, we present a concurrent hierarchical reinforcement learning approach to RoboCup Keepaway. Following the idea of hierarchies of abstract machines (HAMs), we write a partial policy as a HAM from the perspective of a single keeper, run multiple instances of the HAM, and use reinforcement learning to learn the optimal completion of the resulting joint HAM. Furthermore, we apply the idea of exploiting the intrinsic internal transitions within the HAM structure for more efficient learning. Experimental results confirm that the concurrent HAM approaches outperform the state of the art significantly on the very complex RoboCup Keepaway domain.