Task Transfer by Preference-Based Cost Learning

• DOI: 10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33012471
• Publication Date: 2019-09-09T07:49:12Z
• Authors: Mingxuan Jing; Xiaojian Ma; Wenbing Huang; Fuchun Sun; Huaping Liu
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Machine Learning; Machine Learning (stat.ML); 02 engineering and technology; Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computer Science - Robotics; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; Statistics - Machine Learning; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Robotics (cs.RO)

The goal of task transfer in reinforcement learning is migrating the action policy of an agent to the target task from the source task. Given their successes on robotic action planning, current methods mostly rely on two requirements: exactlyrelevant expert demonstrations or the explicitly-coded cost function on target task, both of which, however, are inconvenient to obtain in practice. In this paper, we relax these two strong conditions by developing a novel task transfer framework where the expert preference is applied as a guidance. In particular, we alternate the following two steps: Firstly, letting experts apply pre-defined preference rules to select related expert demonstrates for the target task. Secondly, based on the selection result, we learn the target cost function and trajectory distribution simultaneously via enhanced Adversarial MaxEnt IRL and generate more trajectories by the learned target distribution for the next preference selection. The theoretical analysis on the distribution learning and convergence of the proposed algorithm are provided. Extensive simulations on several benchmarks have been conducted for further verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method.