Keynote Lecture: Building Knowledge For AI AgentsWith Reinforcement Learning
Doina Precup · 2020
Reinforcement learning allows autonomous agents to learn how to act in a stochastic, unknown environment, with which they can interact. Deep reinforcement learning, in particular, has achieved great success in well-defined application domains, such as Go or chess, in which an agent has to learn how to act and there is a clear success criterion. In this talk, I will focus on the potential role of reinforcement learning as a tool for building knowledge representations in AI agents whose goal is to perform continual learning. I will examine a key concept in reinforcement learning, the value function, and discuss its generalization to support various forms of predictive knowledge. I will also discuss the role of temporally extended actions, and their associated predictive models, in learning procedural knowledge. In order to tame the possible complexity of learning knowledge representations, reinforcement learning agents can use the concepts of intents (ie intended consequences of courses of actions) and affordances (which capture knowlege about where actions can be applied). Finally, I will discuss the challenge of how to evaluate reinforcement learning agents whose goal is not just to control their environment, but also to build knowledge about their world.