Skip to main content

Learning Relational Options for Inductive Transfer in Relational Reinforcement Learning

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4894))

Abstract

In reinforcement learning problems, an agent has the task of learning a good or optimal strategy from interaction with his environment. At the start of the learning task, the agent usually has very little information. Therefore, when faced with complex problems that have a large state space, learning a good strategy might be infeasible or too slow to work in practice. One way to overcome this problem, is the use of guidance to supply the agent with traces of “reasonable policies”. However, in a lot of cases it will be hard for the user to supply such a policy. In this paper, we will investigate the use of transfer learning in Relational Reinforcement Learning. The goal of transfer learning is to accelerate learning on a target task after training on a different, but related, source task. More specifically, we introduce an extension of the options framework to the relational setting and show how one can learn skills that can be transferred across similar, but different domains. We present experiments showing the possible benefits of using relational options for transfer learning.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Barto, A., Mahadevan, S.: Recent advances in hierarchical reinforcement learning. Discrete-Event Systems journal 13, 41–77 (2003)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Blockeel, H., De Raedt, L.: Top-down induction of first order logical decision trees. Artificial Intelligence 101(1-2), 285–297 (1998)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Driessens, K., Ramon, J., Blockeel, H.: Speeding up relational reinforcement learning through the use of an incremental first order decision tree learner. In: Flach, P.A., De Raedt, L. (eds.) ECML 2001. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2167, pp. 97–108. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Driessens, K., Ramon, J., Croonenborghs, T.: Transfer learning for reinforcement learning through goal and policy parameterization. In: ICML Workshop on Structural Knowledge Transfer for Machine Learning (Online Proceedings) (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Driessens, K., Dzeroski, S.: Integrating guidance into relational reinforcement learning. Machine Learning 57(3), 271–304 (2004)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  6. Džeroski, S., De Raedt, L., Driessens, K.: Relational reinforcement learning. Machine Learning 43, 7–52 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Fern, A., Yoon, S., Givan, R.: Approximate policy iteration with a policy language bias: Solving relational Markov decision processes. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 25, 85–118 (2006)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  8. Fernández, F., Veloso, M.: Probabilistic policy reuse in a reinforcement learning agent. In: AAMAS ’06: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pp. 720–727. ACM Press, New York (2006)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Konidaris, G., Barto, A.: Building Portable Options: Skill Transfer in Reinforcement Learning. In: Veloso, M. (ed.) Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hyderabad, India, January, 6-12 2007, pp. 2895–900 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Madden, M.G., Howley, T.: Transfer of Experience Between Reinforcement Learning Environments with Progressive Difficulty. AI. Rev. 21(3-4), 375–398 (2004)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Perkins, T.J., Precup, D.: Using Options for Knowledge Transfer in Reinforcement Learning. In: Technical Report UM-CS-1999-034, University of Massachusetts, MA, USA (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Sutton, R., Barto, A.: Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Sutton, R., Precup, D., Singh, S.: Between mdps and semi-mdps: A framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning. Artificial Intelligence 112, 181–211 (1999)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. Tadepalli, P., Givan, R., Driessens, K.: Relational reinforcement learning: An overview. In: Proceedings of the ICML 2004 Workshop on Relational Reinforcement Learning (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Torrey, L., Shavlik, J., Walker, T., Maclin, R.: Skill acquisition via transfer learning and advice taking. In: Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 425–436 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Hendrik Blockeel Jan Ramon Jude Shavlik Prasad Tadepalli

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Croonenborghs, T., Driessens, K., Bruynooghe, M. (2008). Learning Relational Options for Inductive Transfer in Relational Reinforcement Learning. In: Blockeel, H., Ramon, J., Shavlik, J., Tadepalli, P. (eds) Inductive Logic Programming. ILP 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4894. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78469-2_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78469-2_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-78468-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-78469-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics