A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Method for Persistent Time-Sensitive Tasks

Reinforcement learning has been applied to many interesting problems such as the famous TD-gammon [1] and the inverted helicopter flight [2]. However little effort has been put into developing methods to learn policies for complex persistent tasks and tasks that are time-sensitive. In this paper we take a step towards solving this problem by using signal temporal logic (STL) as task specification, and taking advantage of the temporal abstraction feature that the options framework provide. We show via simulation that a relatively easy to implement algorithm that combines STL and options can learn a satisfactory policy with a small number of training cases.