A reinforcement learning architecture that transfers knowledge between skills when solving multiple tasks

When humans learn several skills to solve multiple tasks, they exhibit an extraordinary capacity to transfer knowledge between them. We present here the last enhanced version of a bio-inspired reinforcement-learning modular architecture able to perform skill-to-skill knowledge transfer and called 'TERL Transfer Expert Reinforcement Learning model'. TERL architecture is based on a reinforcement-learning actor-critic model where both the actor and the critic have a hierarchical structure, inspired by the mixture-of-experts model, formed by a gating network that selects experts specialising in learning the policies or value functions of different tasks. A key feature of TERL is the capacity of its gating networks to accumulate, in parallel, evidence on the capacity of experts to solve the new tasks so as to increase the responsibility for action of the best ones. A second key feature is the use of two different responsibility signals for the experts' functioning and learning: this allows the training of multiple experts for each task so that some of them can be later recruited to solve new tasks and avoid catastrophic interference. The utility of TERL mechanisms is shown with tests involving two simulated dynamic robot arms engaged in solving reaching tasks, in particular a planar 2-degrees-of-freedom arm, and a 3D 4-degrees-of-freedom arm.

Tipo Pubblicazione: 
Articolo
Author or Creator: 
Paolo Tommasino
Daniele Caligiore
Marco Mirolli
Gianluca Baldassarre
Publisher: 
IEEE, Stati Uniti d'America
Source: 
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (2016). doi:10.1109/TCDS.2016.2607018
info:cnr-pdr/source/autori:Paolo Tommasino ; Daniele Caligiore ; Marco Mirolli ; Gianluca Baldassarre/titolo:A reinforcement learning architecture that transfers knowledge between skills when solving multiple tasks/doi:10.1109/TCDS.2016.2607018/rivista:IE
Date: 
2016
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/399843
https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2016.2607018
info:doi:10.1109/TCDS.2016.2607018
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7592409/
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Ritratto di Marco Mirolli
Real name: 
Ritratto di Daniele Caligiore
Real name: