What is Reinforcement Learning?
Reinforcement learning is concerned with how an agent ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize its long-term reward. It is a very general framework, and as such, has interconnections with many fields, encompassing
- computer science (artificial intelligence, machine learning),
- engineering (information theory, adaptive control),
- economics (rational agents, game theory),
- mathematics (statistics),
- psychology (behaviorism, motivation, incentives),
- philosophy (inductive inference, theory of knowledge).
Reinforcement learning (augmented by ideas from information theory) can provide a unified theory for artificial intelligence, and is key to accomplishing more robust and flexible solutions, e.g. in computer games and autonomous robots.
Introductory Literature
- A brief encyclopedia article on reinforcement learning at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning
- F. Woergoetter and B. Porr (2008),
Reinforcement Learning, Scholarpedia, 3(3):1448.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Reinforcement_learning
A comparison of the machine learning and neural network perspective of RL.
- L. P. Kaelbling and M. L. Littman and A. W. Moore,
Reinforcement learning: A Survey,
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 4 (1996) 237—285
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/jair/pub/volume4/kaelbling96a.pdf
- R. Sutton and A. Barto. Reinforcement learning: An introduction
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press (1998),
http://www-anw.cs.umass.edu/~rich/book/the-book.html
Classic introductory textbook to RL. Highly Recommended.
It requires no background knowledge, describes the key ideas, open problems, and great applications of this field.
A longer list of recent and classical papers on Reinforcement Learning is here
Other Resources
- RL mailing list
http://groups.google.com/group/rl-list
- RL&AI links by Rich Sutton
http://rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/rlai.html
- Annotated Book and Course recommendations for students and researchers
http://www.hutter1.net/ai/introref.htm
page revision: 0, last edited: 25 Nov 2010 22:58