Date of Award
Spring 2019
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
School
Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering
Committee Chair
Bikramjit Banerjee
Committee Chair School
Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering
Committee Member 2
Dia Ali
Committee Member 2 School
Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering
Committee Member 3
Beddhu Murali
Committee Member 3 School
Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering
Abstract
Learning from human demonstration (LfD), among many speedup techniques for reinforcement learning (RL), has seen many successful applications. We consider one LfD technique called Human Agent Transfer (HAT), where a model of the human demonstrator’s decision function is induced via supervised learning, and used as an initial bias for RL. Some recent work in LfD have investigated learning from observations only, i.e., when only the demonstrator’s states (and not its actions) are available to the learner. Since the demonstrator’s actions are treated as labels for HAT, supervised learning becomes untenable in their absence. We adapt the idea of learning an inverse dynamics model from the data acquired by the learner’s interactions with the environment, and deploy it to fill in the missing actions of the demonstrator. The resulting version of HAT—called State-only HAT (SoHAT)—is experimentally shown to preserve some advantages of HAT in benchmark domains with both discrete and continuous actions. This thesis also establishes principled modifications of an existing baseline algorithm—called A3C—to create its HAT and SoHAT variants that are used in our experiments.
Copyright
2019, Sneha Racharla
Recommended Citation
Racharla, Sneha, "Human Agent Transfer from Observations" (2019). Master's Theses. 630.
https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/630