Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning has successfully solved a number of challenging control tasks. However, learned policies typically have difficulty generalizing to novel environments. We propose an algorithm for learning programmatic state machine policies that can capture repeating behaviors. By doing so, they have the ability to generalize to instances requiring an arbitrary number of repetitions, a property we call inductive generalization. However, state machine policies are hard to learn since they consist of a combination of continuous and discrete structure. We propose a learning framework called adaptive teaching, which learns a state machine policy by imitating a teacher; in contrast to traditional imitation learning, our teacher adaptively updates itself based on the structure of the student. We show how our algorithm can be used to learn policies that inductively generalize to novel environments, whereas traditional neural network policies fail to do so.