Metric learning for reinforcement learning agents

  • Authors:
  • Matthew E. Taylor;Brian Kulis;Fei Sha

  • Affiliations:
  • Lafayette College;University of California, Berkeley;University of Southern California

  • Venue:
  • The 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

A key component of any reinforcement learning algorithm is the underlying representation used by the agent. While reinforcement learning (RL) agents have typically relied on hand-coded state representations, there has been a growing interest in learning this representation. While inputs to an agent are typically fixed (i.e., state variables represent sensors on a robot), it is desirable to automatically determine the optimal relative scaling of such inputs, as well as to diminish the impact of irrelevant features. This work introduces Holler, a novel distance metric learning algorithm, and combines it with an existing instance-based RL algorithm to achieve precisely these goals. The algorithms' success is highlighted via empirical measurements on a set of six tasks within the mountain car domain.