General game learning using knowledge transfer

  • Authors:
  • Bikramjit Banerjee;Peter Stone

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'07 Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on Artifical intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We present a reinforcement learning game player that can interact with a General Game Playing system and transfer knowledge learned in one game to expedite learning in many other games. We use the technique of value-function transfer where general features are extracted from the state space of a previous game and matched with the completely different state space of a new game. To capture the underlying similarity of vastly disparate state spaces arising from different games, we use a game-tree lookahead structure for features. We show that such feature-based value function transfer learns superior policies faster than a reinforcement learning agent that does not use knowledge transfer. Furthermore, knowledge transfer using lookahead features can capture opponent-specific value-functions, i.e. can exploit an opponent's weaknesses to learn faster than a reinforcement learner that uses lookahead with minimax (pessimistic) search against the same opponent.