This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of current work are summarized. Reinforcement learning is the problem faced by an agent that learns behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment. The work described here has a resemblance to work in psychology, but differs considerably in the details and in the use of the word "reinforcement." The paper discusses central issues of reinforcement learning, including trading off exploration and exploitation, establishing the foundations of the field via Markov decision theory, learning from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden state. It concludes with a survey of some implemented systems and an assessment of the practical utility of current methods for reinforcement learning.

For manytypes of learners one can compute the statistically "optimal" way to select data. We review how these techniques have been used with feedforward neural networks [MacKay, 1992# Cohn, 1994]. We then showhow the same principles may be used to select data for two alternative, statistically-based learning architectures: mixtures of Gaussians and locally weighted regression. While the techniques for neural networks are expensive and approximate, the techniques for mixtures of Gaussians and locally weighted regression are both efficient and accurate.

This paper discusses why traditional reinforcement learning methods, and algorithms applied to those models, result in poor performance in situated domains characterized by multiple goals, noisy state, and inconsistent reinforcement. We propose a methodology for designing reinforcement functions that take advantage of implicit domain knowledge in order to accelerate learning in such domains. The methodology involves the use of heterogeneous reinforcement functions and progress estimators, and applies to learning in domains with a single agent or with multiple agents. The methodology is experimentally validated on a group of mobile robots learning a foraging task. 1 INTRODUCTION Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the methodology of choice for learning in a variety of different domains. Its convergence properties and potential biological relevance make it an approach worth studying. RL has been shown to perform well in Markovian domains, such as games (Tesauro 1992) and simulations ...

This thesis addresses situated, embodied agents interacting in complex domains. It focuses on two problems: 1) synthesis and analysis of intelligent group behavior, and 2) learning in complex group environments. Basic behaviors, control laws that cluster constraints to achieve particular goals and have the appropriate compositional properties, are proposed as effective primitives for control and learning. The thesis describes the process of selecting such basic behaviors, formally specifying them, algorithmically implementing them, and empirically evaluating them. All of the proposed ideas are validated with a group of up to 20 mobile robots using a basic behavior set consisting of: safe--wandering, following, aggregation, dispersion, and homing. The set of basic behaviors acts as a substrate for achieving more complex high--level goals and tasks. Two behavior combination operators are introduced, and verified by combining subsets of the above basic behavior set to implement collective flocking, foraging, and docking. A methodology is introduced for automatically constructing higher--level behaviors

Lazy learning methods provide useful representations and training algorithms for learning about complex phenomena during autonomous adaptive control of complex systems. This paper surveys ways in which locally weighted learning, a type of lazy learning, has been applied by us to control tasks. We explain various forms that control tasks can take, and how this affects the choice of learning paradigm. The discussion section explores the interesting impact that explicitly remembering all previous experiences has on the problem of learning to control.

... This article illustrates the potential learning capabilities of purely local learning and offers an interesting and powerful approach to learning with receptive fields.

We consider the question "How should one act when the only goal is to learn as much as possible?" Building on the theoretical results of Fedorov [1972] and MacKay [1992], we apply techniques from Optimal Experiment Design (OED) to guide the query/action selection of a neural network learner. We demonstrate that these techniques allow the learner to minimize its generalization error by exploring its domain efficiently and completely.We conclude that, while not a panacea, OED-based query/action has muchto offer, especially in domains where its high computational costs can be tolerated.

Locally weighted polynomial regression (LWPR) is a popular instance-based algorithm for learning continuous non-linear mappings. For more than two or three inputs and for more than a few thousand datapoints the computational expense of predictions is daunting. We discuss drawbacks with previous approaches to dealing with this problem, and present a new algorithm based on a multiresolution search of a quicklyconstructible augmented kd-tree. Without needing to rebuild the tree, we can make fast predictions with arbitrary local weighting functions, arbitrary kernel widths and arbitrary queries. The paper begins with a new, faster, algorithm for exact LWPR predictions. Next we introduce an approximation that achieves up to a two-ordersof -magnitude speedup with negligible accuracy losses. Increasing a certain approximation parameter achieves greater speedups still, but with a correspondingly larger accuracy degradation. This is nevertheless useful during operations such as the early stages...

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the primary source of bias is engineering. This dissertation

An approach is presented to learning high dimensional functions in the case where the learning algorithm can affect the generation of new data. A local modeling algorithm, locally weighted regression, is used to represent the learned function. Architectural parameters of the approach, such as distance metrics, are also localized and become a function of the query point instead of being global. Statistical tests are given for when a local model is good enough and sampling should be moved to a new area. Our methods explicitly deal with the case where prediction accuracy requirements exist during exploration: By gradually shifting a “center of exploration ” and controlling the speed of the shift with local prediction accuracy, a goal-directed exploration of state space takes place along the fringes of the current data support until the task goal is achieved. We illustrate this approach with simulation results and results from a real robot learning a complex juggling task. 1