In plain words: A robot-control agent trained to handle many tasks at once rather than one at a time, tested in a virtual playroom with realistic physics and automatically generated tasks. It learned faster than single-task training and solved some tasks the single-task version failed entirely.
Abstract · The Intentional Unintentional Agent: Learning to Solve Many Continuous Control Tasks Simultaneously
This paper introduces the Intentional Unintentional (IU) agent. This agent endows the deep deterministic policy gradients (DDPG) agent for continuous control with the ability to solve several tasks simultaneously. Learning to solve many tasks simultaneously has been a long-standing, core goal of artificial intelligence, inspired by infant development and motivated by the desire to build flexible robot manipulators capable of many diverse behaviours. We show that the IU agent not only learns to solve many tasks simultaneously but it also learns faster than agents that target a single task at-a-time. In some cases, where the single task DDPG method completely fails, the IU agent successfully solves the task. To demonstrate this, we build a playroom environment using the MuJoCo physics engine, and introduce a grounded formal language to automatically generate tasks.
Serkan Cabi, Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo, Matthew W. Hoffman, Misha Denil, Ziyu Wang, Nando de Freitas
arXiv:1707.03300 · cs.AI · submitted Jul 11, 2017
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