Hierarchical Decision Making with Structured Policies: A Principled Design via Inverse Optimization

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28764v1
• Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2026 06:46:37 GMT
• Title: Hierarchical Decision Making with Structured Policies: A Principled Design via Inverse Optimization
• Abstract summary: We propose a principled framework that integrates upper-level goal abstraction with structured lower-level decision making.<n>Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines based on end-to-end RL, learning-augmented optimal control, and existing hierarchical RL approaches in both efficiency and decision quality.
• Score: 5.406955022340469
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Hierarchical decision-making frameworks are pivotal for addressing complex control tasks, enabling agents to decompose intricate problems into manageable subgoals. Despite their promise, existing hierarchical policies face critical limitations: (i) reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods struggle to guarantee strict constraint satisfaction, and (ii) optimal control (OC)-based approaches often rely on myopic and computationally prohibitive formulations. To reconcile these trade-offs, hierarchical RL-OC architectures have emerged as a promising paradigm. However, the formulation of the lower-level optimization within these frameworks remains underexplored, often relying on heuristic or myopic objectives. In this work, we propose a principled framework that systematically integrates upper-level goal abstraction with structured lower-level decision making. We adopt an inverse optimization approach to inform the structure of the lower-level problem from expert demonstrations, ensuring that the objective of the lower-level policy remains aligned with the overall long-term task goal. To validate the approach, our framework is evaluated on distinct decision making tasks: network-based resource allocation and continuous collision avoidance. Empirical results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines based on end-to-end RL, learning-augmented optimal control, and existing hierarchical RL approaches in both efficiency and decision quality.

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