Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-grvzd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-27T07:44:59.834Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Overcoming incorrect knowledge in plan-based reward shaping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2016

Kyriakos Efthymiadis ,
Sam Devlin  and
Daniel Kudenko
Kyriakos Efthymiadis
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Deramore Lane, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5GH, UK e-mail: kirk@cs.york.ac.uk, sam.devlin@york.ac.uk, daniel.kudenko@york.ac.uk
Sam Devlin
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Deramore Lane, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5GH, UK e-mail: kirk@cs.york.ac.uk, sam.devlin@york.ac.uk, daniel.kudenko@york.ac.uk
Daniel Kudenko
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Deramore Lane, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5GH, UK e-mail: kirk@cs.york.ac.uk, sam.devlin@york.ac.uk, daniel.kudenko@york.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Reward shaping has been shown to significantly improve an agent’s performance in reinforcement learning. Plan-based reward shaping is a successful approach in which a STRIPS plan is used in order to guide the agent to the optimal behaviour. However, if the provided knowledge is wrong, it has been shown the agent will take longer to learn the optimal policy. Previously, in some cases, it was better to ignore all prior knowledge despite it only being partially incorrect.

This paper introduces a novel use of knowledge revision to overcome incorrect domain knowledge when provided to an agent receiving plan-based reward shaping. Empirical results show that an agent using this method can outperform the previous agent receiving plan-based reward shaping without knowledge revision.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
The Knowledge Engineering Review , Volume 31 , Issue 1: Adaptive Learning Agents , January 2016 , pp. 31 - 43
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Asmuth, J., Littman, M. & Zinkov, R. 2008. Potential-based shaping in model-based reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 604–609.Google Scholar
Bertsekas, D. P. 2007. Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control (2 Vol Set), 3rd edition. Athena Scientific.Google Scholar
Devlin, S., Grześ, M. & Kudenko, D. 2011. An empirical study of potential-based reward shaping and advice in complex, multi-agent systems. Advances in Complex Systems.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devlin, S. & Kudenko, D. 2011. Theoretical considerations of potential-based reward shaping for multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of The Tenth Annual International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.Google Scholar
Devlin, S. & Kudenko, D. 2012. Dynamic potential-based reward shaping. In Proceedings of The Eleventh Annual International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.Google Scholar
Efthymiadis, K. & Kudenko, D. 2013. Using plan-based reward shaping to learn strategies in StarCraft: Brood War. In Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG). IEEE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fikes, R. E. & Nilsson, N. J. 1972. STRIPS: a new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence 2(3), 189–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gärdenfors, P. 1992. Belief revision: an introduction. Belief Revision 29, 1–28.Google Scholar
Grześ, M. & Kudenko, D. 2008a. Multigrid reinforcement learning with reward shaping. In Artificial Neural Networks-ICANN 2008, 357–366.Google Scholar
Grześ, M. & Kudenko, D. 2008b. Plan-based reward shaping for reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS’08), 22–29. IEEE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marthi, B. 2007. Automatic shaping and decomposition of reward functions. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning, 608. ACM.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ng, A. Y., Harada, D. & Russell, S. J. 1999. Policy invariance under reward transformations: theory and application to reward shaping. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Machine Learning, 278–287.Google Scholar
Puterman, M. L. 1994. Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming. John Wiley and Sons, Inc.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Randløv, J. & Alstrom, P. 1998. Learning to drive a bicycle using reinforcement learning and shaping. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Machine Learning, 463–471.Google Scholar
Sutton, R. S. & Barto, A. G. 1998. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. MIT Press.Google Scholar