Weekly “what are you reading” Thread

Writing a paper on Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in specific settings, so I need to do a literature survey on the topic.

Previously, I had limited myself to simplistic settings, so this time I thought I'll try something more interesting and started working on a robotic setting similar to that in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning With Universal Policies for Multistep Robotic Manipulation.

The goal is to teach a robotic gripper to handle Lego-like blocks like a toddler. The approach in the paper mentioned above is to learn a goal-conditioned high-level policy that (implicitly) plans and creates low-level goals, that are then given to a low level policy that actually does the work to achieve these goals. Much like how I do my work, ironically.

I didn't fully get into the details of the algorithm, which is a combination of multiple techniques including DDPG, HER and more, let alone the actual code. But we have verified that the author's official code actually performs as advertised, so that's a start.