Incremental Learning of Procedural Planning Knowledge in Challenging Environments

Autonomous agents that learn about their environment can be divided into two broad classes. One class of existing learners, reinforcement learners, typically employ weak learning methods to directly modify an agent's execution knowledge. These systems are robust in dynamic and complex environments but generally do not support planning or the pursuit of multiple goals. In contrast, symbolic theory revision systems learn declarative planning knowledge that allows them to pursue multiple goals in large state spaces, but these approaches are generally only applicable to fully sensed, deterministic environments with no exogenous events. This research investigates the hypothesis that by limiting an agent to procedural access to symbolic planning knowledge, the agent can combine the powerful, knowledge intensive learning performance of the theory revision systems with the robust performance in complex environments of the reinforcement learners. The system, IMPROV, uses an expressive kno...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: CI
• Authors: Douglas J. Pearson, John E. Laird
• Keywords: CI 2005, Complex Environments, Learning Method, Theory Revision Systems