Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Uncertainty-Guided Diffusional Subgoals

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) learns to make decisions on multiple levels of temporal abstraction. A key challenge in HRL is that the low-level policy changes over time, making it difficult for the high-level policy to generate effective subgoals. To address this issue, the high-level policy must capture a complex subgoal distribution while also accounting for uncertainty in its estimates. We propose an approach that trains a conditional diffusion model regularized by a Gaussian Process (GP) prior to generate a complex variety of subgoals while leveraging principled GP uncertainty quantification. Building on this framework, we develop a strategy that selects subgoals from both the diffusion policy and GP's predictive mean. Our approach outperforms prior HRL methods in both sample efficiency and performance on challenging continuous control benchmarks.

@article{wang2025_2505.21750,
  title={ Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Uncertainty-Guided Diffusional Subgoals },
  author={ Vivienne Huiling Wang and Tinghuai Wang and Joni Pajarinen },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21750},
  year={ 2025 }
}