Reinforcement learning is an area of artificial intelligence that studies the ability of autonomous agents to improve their behavior in the absence of an informed instructor. Although reinforcement learning has achieved success in a wide range of applications, it becomes less consistent as the size of a task grows.
This book attempts to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning in realistic tasks by identifying a certain type of task structure. A task that displays this type of structure can be decomposed into a hierarchy of subtasks. Each subtask can be simplified using state...