Using cases as heuristics in reinforcement learning: a transfer learning application

  • Authors:
  • Luiz A. Celiberto, Jr.;Jackson P. Matsuura;Ramon Lopez De Mantaras;Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi

  • Affiliations:
  • Electrical Engineering Dept., Technological Institute of Aeronautics, São José dos Campos, Brazil;Electrical Engineering Dept., Technological Institute of Aeronautics, Sáo José dos Campos, Brazil;AI Research Institute, IIIA, CSIC, Campus Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain;Electrical Engineering Dept., Centro Universitário da FEI, São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Second international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume Volume Two
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In this paper we propose to combine three AI techniques to speed up a Reinforcement Learning algorithm in a Transfer Learning problem: Case-based Reasoning, Heuristically Accelerated Reinforcement Learning and Neural Networks. To do so, we propose a new algorithm, called L3, which works in 3 stages: in the first stage, it uses Reinforcement Learning to learn how to perform one task, and stores the optimal policy for this problem as a case-base; in the second stage, it uses a Neural Network to map actions from one domain to actions in the other domain and; in the third stage, it uses the case-base learned in the first stage as heuristics to speed up the learning performance in a related, but different, task. The RL algorithm used in the first phase is the Q-learning and in the third phase is the recently proposed Case-based Heuristically Accelerated Q-learning. A set of empirical evaluations were conducted in transferring the learning between two domains, the Acrobot and the Robocup 3D: the policy learned during the solution of the Acrobot Problem is transferred and used to speed up the learning of stability policies for a humanoid robot in the Robocup 3D simulator. The results show that the use of this algorithm can lead to a significant improvement in the performance of the agent.