Peter Stone's Selected Publications

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Evolving Keepaway Soccer Players through Task Decomposition

Evolving Keepaway Soccer Players through Task Decomposition.
Shimon Whiteson, Nate Kohl, Risto Miikkulainen, and Peter Stone.
Machine Learning, 59(1):5–30, May 2005.
Some videos of the agents before and after learning referenced in the paper.
The publisher's official version
An earlier version appeared in the proceedings of The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2003 (GECCO-2003)

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Abstract

Complex control tasks can often be solved by decomposing them into hierarchies of manageable subtasks. Such decompositions require designers to decide how much human knowledge should be used to help learn the resulting components. On one hand, encoding human knowledge requires manual effort and may incorrectly constrain the learner's hypothesis space or guide it away from the best solutions. On the other hand, it may make learning easier and enable the learner to tackle more complex tasks. This article examines the impact of this trade-off in tasks of varying difficulty. A space laid out by two dimensions is explored: 1) how much human assistance is given and 2) how difficult the task is. In particular, the neuroevolution learning algorithm is enhanced with three different methods for learning the components that result from a task decomposition. The first method, coevolution, is mostly unassisted by human knowledge. The second method, layered learning, is highly assisted. The third method, concurrent layered learning, is a novel combination of the first two that attempts to exploit human knowledge while retaining some of coevolution's flexibility. Detailed empirical results are presented comparing and contrasting these three approaches on two versions of a complex task, namely robot soccer keepaway, that differ in difficulty of learning. These results confirm that, given a suitable task decomposition, neuroevolution can master difficult tasks. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the appropriate level of human assistance depends critically on the difficulty of the problem.

BibTeX Entry

@Article{MLJ05,
        author="Shimon Whiteson and Nate Kohl and Risto Miikkulainen and Peter Stone",
        title="Evolving Keepaway Soccer Players through Task Decomposition",
        journal="Machine Learning",
        year="2005",month="May",
        volume="59",number="1",pages="5--30",
        abstract="
                  Complex control tasks can often be solved by
                  decomposing them into hierarchies of manageable
                  subtasks.  Such decompositions require designers to
                  decide how much human knowledge should be used to
                  help learn the resulting components.  On one hand,
                  encoding human knowledge requires manual effort and
                  may incorrectly constrain the learner's hypothesis
                  space or guide it away from the best solutions.  On
                  the other hand, it may make learning easier and
                  enable the learner to tackle more complex tasks.
                  This article examines the impact of this trade-off
                  in tasks of varying difficulty.  A space laid out by
                  two dimensions is explored: 1) how much human
                  assistance is given and 2) how difficult the task
                  is.  In particular, the neuroevolution learning
                  algorithm is enhanced with three different methods
                  for learning the components that result from a task
                  decomposition.  The first method, coevolution, is
                  mostly unassisted by human knowledge.  The second
                  method, layered learning, is highly assisted.  The
                  third method, concurrent layered learning, is a
                  novel combination of the first two that attempts to
                  exploit human knowledge while retaining some of
                  coevolution's flexibility.  Detailed empirical
                  results are presented comparing and contrasting
                  these three approaches on two versions of a complex
                  task, namely robot soccer keepaway, that differ in
                  difficulty of learning.  These results confirm that,
                  given a suitable task decomposition, neuroevolution
                  can master difficult tasks.  Furthermore, they
                  demonstrate that the appropriate level of human
                  assistance depends critically on the difficulty of
                  the problem.",
        wwwnote={Some <a href="http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/pages/research/keepaway-movies/keepaway.html">videos of the agents before and after learning</a> referenced in the paper.<br>  The <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10994-005-0460-9">publisher's official version</a><br>An earlier version appeared in the proceedings of <a href="http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2003/">The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2003</a> (GECCO-2003)},
}

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