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Object-Focused Advice in Reinforcement Learning

Published: 09 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

In order for robots and intelligent agents to interact with and learn from people with no machine-learning expertise, robots should be able to learn from natural human instruction. Many human explanations consist of simple sentences without state information, yet most machine learning techniques that incorporate human guidance cannot use non-specific explanations. This work aims to learn policies from a few sentences that aren't state specific. The proposed Object-focused advice links an object to an action, and allows a person to generalize over an object's state space. To evaluate this technique, agents were trained using Object-focused advice collected from participants in an experiment in the Mario Bros. domain. The results show that Object-focused advice performs better than when no advice is given, the agent can learn where to apply the advice in the state space, and the agent can recover from adversarial advice. Also, including warnings of what not do to in addition to advice of what actions to take improves performance.

References

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L. C. Cobo, C. L. Isbell, and A. L. Thomaz. Object focused q-learning for autonomous agents. In Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, pages 1061--1068. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2013.
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S. Griffith, K. Subramanian, J. Scholz, C. Isbell, and A. L. Thomaz. Policy shaping: Integrating human feedback with reinforcement learning. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pages 2625--2633, 2013.
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J. MacGlashan, M. Babes-Vroman, M. desJardins, M. Littman, S. Muresan, S. Squire, S. Tellex, D. Arumugam, and L. Yang. Grounding english commands to reward functions. In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, Rome, Italy, July 2015.
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Published In

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AAMAS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems
May 2016
1580 pages
ISBN:9781450342391

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  • IFAAMAS

In-Cooperation

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International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

Publication History

Published: 09 May 2016

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Author Tags

  1. advice
  2. human teachers
  3. reinforcement learning

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  • Extended-abstract

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  • ONR

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AAMAS '16
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AAMAS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 137 of 550 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

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