Going Beyond State-Reaching: Learning Abstractions for Intrinsically Motivated Option Discovery

Temporal abstraction via options can improve exploration in vast environments. However, existing option discovery algorithms find subgoals that target all aspects of the state simultaneously. This state-reaching approach produces options that only apply in narrow regions of the state-space, eventually causing an explosion in the number of options that overwhelms the agent, and impedes progress on its primary task of reward maximization. We introduce an algorithm that instead identifies a small, relevant subset of features for each subgoal, yielding options that generalize broadly and accelerate exploration. Our approach learns abstract, transferrable options and achieves rapid exploration in three sparse-reward, image-based domains, including the Atari game MontezumasRevenge.