A causal approach to hierarchical decomposition of factored MDPs
Anders Jönsson, Andrew G. Barto · 2005
We present Variable Influence Structure Analysis, an algorithm that dynamically performs hierarchical decomposition of factored Markov decision processes. Our algorithm determines causal relationships between state variables and introduces temporally-extended actions that cause the values of state variables to change. Each temporally-extended action corresponds to a subtask that is significantly easier to solve than the overall task. Results from experiments show great promise in scaling to larger tasks.