Integrating sporadic imitation in Reinforcement Learning robots

Abstract

Although the combination of reinforcement learning and imitation has been already considered in recent research, it always revolved around fixed settings where demonstrator and imitator are fixed and the imitation process is a well-defined period of time. What is missing is the investigation of approaches that also work in scenarios where imitation is only sporadically possible. This means that in a multi-robot scenario a robot is now allowed to interrupt another robot by asking to repeat certain actions, but can only observe and integrate information bits delivered occasionally. In this paper we present how that can be done in continuous and noisy environment within an SMDP context.