Unsupervised Learning of Temporal Abstractions Using Slot-Based Transformers

Abstract

The discovery of reusable sub-routines simplifies decision-making and planning in complex reinforcement learning problems. Previous approaches propose to learn such temporal abstractions in a purely unsupervised fashion through observing state-action trajectories gathered from executing a policy. However, a current limitation is that they process each trajectory in an entirely sequential manner, which prevents them from revising earlier decisions about sub-routine boundary points in light of new incoming information. In this work we propose SloTTAr, a fully parallel approach that integrates sequence processing Transformers with a Slot Attention module for learning about sub-routines in an unsupervised fashion. We demonstrate how SloTTAr is capable of outperforming strong baselines in terms of boundary point discovery, while being up to $30\mathrm{x}$ faster on existing benchmarks.