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Helping an Agent Reach a Different Goal by Action Transfer in Reinforcement Learning

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AI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11919))

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Abstract

Reinforcement learning agents can be helped by the knowledge transferred from experienced agents. This paper studies the problem of how an experienced agent helps another agent learn when they have different learning goals by action transfer. This problem is motivated by the widely existing situations where agents have different learning goals and only action transfer is available to agents. To tackle the problem, we propose an approach to facilitate the transfer of actions that are right to a learning agent’s goal. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in transferring right actions to an agent and helping the agent learn to reach a different goal.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We follow a general setting where \( \pi \) is optimal. Considering sub-optimal \( \pi \) is not the main issue in this paper, and would be left as future work.

  2. 2.

    There are multiple goals when multiple states have the same maximum V value. The technical details for multi-goal and one-goal situations are generally the same. We only describe the one-goal situation for clear description.

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Acknowledgement

This research is supported by a DECRA Project (DP140100007) from Australia Research Council (ARC), a UPA and an IPTA scholarships from University of Wollongong, Australia.

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Correspondence to Yuchen Wang .

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Wang, Y., Ren, F., Zhang, M. (2019). Helping an Agent Reach a Different Goal by Action Transfer in Reinforcement Learning. In: Liu, J., Bailey, J. (eds) AI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11919. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35288-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35288-2_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35287-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35288-2

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