Reinforcement Learning Agents Providing Advice in Complex Video Games

M. Taylor, N. Charboni, A. Fachantidis, I. Vlahavas, L. Torrey, “Reinforcement Learning Agents Providing Advice in Complex Video Games”, Connection Science, Taylor & Francis, (in press), 2014.

This paper introduces a teacher-student framework for reinforcement learning. In this frame- work, a teacher agent instructs a student agent by suggesting actions the student should take as it learns. However, the teacher may only give such advice a limited number of times. We present several novel algorithms that teachers can use to budget their advice effectively, and we evaluate them in two experimental domains: Mountain Car and Pac-Man. Our results show that the same amount of advice, given at different moments, can have different effects on student learning, and that teachers can significantly affect student learning even when students use different learning methods and state representations.