Episodic task learning in Markov decision processes

Hierarchical algorithms for Markov decision processes have been proved to be useful for the problem domains with multiple subtasks. Although the existing hierarchical approaches are strong in task decomposition, they are weak in task abstraction, which is more important for task analysis and modeling. In this paper, we propose a task-oriented design to strengthen the task abstraction. Our approach learns an episodic task model from the problem domain, with which the planner obtains the same control effect, with concise structure and much improved performance than the original model. According to our analysis and experimental evaluation, our approach has better performance than the existing hierarchical algorithms, such as MAXQ and HEXQ.