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Exploring Exploration: Comparing Children with RL Agents in Unified Environments (arxiv.org)
1 point by jonbaer on May 12, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Children explore the world more cleverly than today's trial-and-error learning programs, yet the two are rarely tested side by side. This work puts kids and programs in the same 3D game world to watch how each explores, and early tests suggest the setup can show where the programs fall short.

Abstract

Research in developmental psychology consistently shows that children explore the world thoroughly and efficiently and that this exploration allows them to learn. In turn, this early learning supports more robust generalization and intelligent behavior later in life. While much work has gone into developing methods for exploration in machine learning, artificial agents have not yet reached the high standard set by their human counterparts. In this work we propose using DeepMind Lab (Beattie et al., 2016) as a platform to directly compare child and agent behaviors and to develop new exploration techniques. We outline two ongoing experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of a direct comparison, and outline a number of open research questions that we believe can be tested using this methodology.

Eliza Kosoy, Jasmine Collins, David M. Chan, Sandy Huang, Deepak Pathak, Pulkit Agrawal, John Canny, Alison Gopnik, Jessica B. Hamrick
arXiv:2005.02880 · cs.AI · submitted May 6, 2020 · updated Jul 1, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Published as a workshop paper at "Bridging AI and Cognitive Science" (ICLR 2020)

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