When to Plan: Learning to Select Between Reactive Control and Deliberative Planning

Abstract

It has long been recognized that humans have the ability to switch between fast, reactive decision-making and slower, deliberative planning. In this paper, we study the question of how to learn this ability, known as meta-reasoning, in artificial agents. We model reactive decision-making as a policy that directly maps state observations to actions. Such policies can be trained with reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning, but may generalize poorly outside of their training distribution. Alternatively, model-based decision-time planning is more likely to produce good actions across a broader set of states but requires additional computation time, which delays acting. In this work, we introduce an RL method for training a meta-reasoning policy that allocates computation by conditioning on a reactive-policy uncertainty score. This score enables it to predict when the reactive policy is likely to perform poorly and when planning is needed. We conduct an empirical study on motion planning and navigation environments, showing that this design enables the meta-reasoning policy to learn when the reactive policy provides a good-enough action versus when decision-time planning is needed. Additionally, we show that our design enables the meta-agent to shift toward fully reactive control as the reactive policy improves.