---
title: "Constructing Abstraction Hierarchies Using a Skill-Symbol Loop"
authors:
  - "George Dimitri Konidaris"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/236"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/0236.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2016
pages: "1648-1653"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Constructing Abstraction Hierarchies Using a Skill-Symbol Loop

George Dimitri Konidaris

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1648-1653.

## Abstract

We describe a framework for building abstraction hierarchies whereby an agent alternates skill- and representation-construction phases to construct a sequence of increasingly abstract Markov decision processes. Our formulation builds on recent results showing that the appropriate abstract representation of a problem is specified by the agent's skills. We describe how such a hierarchy can be used for fast planning, and illustrate the construction of an appropriate hierarchy for the Taxi domain.