Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for detecting intermediate reinforcement learning goals. One of the methods includes obtaining a plurality of demonstration sequences, each of the demonstration sequences being a sequence of images of an environment while a respective instance of a reinforcement learning task is being performed; for each demonstration sequence, processing each image in the demonstration sequence through an image processing neural network to determine feature values for a respective set of features for the image; determining, from the demonstration sequences, a partitioning of the reinforcement learning task into a plurality of subtasks, wherein each image in each demonstration sequence is assigned to a respective subtask of the plurality of subtasks; and determining, from the feature values for the images in the demonstration sequences, a respective set of discriminative features for each of the plurality of subtasks.