Högskolan i Skövde

For an agent to autonomously interact in a real world environment, it needs tolearn how to behave in the different scenarios that it may face. There are differentapproaches of modeling an artificial agent with interactive capabilities. Oneapproach is providing the agent with knowledge beforehand. Another approachis to let the agent learn from data and interaction. A well-known techniques ofthe former approach is supervised learning. In this approach, data is collected,labeled and provided to train the network as pre-defined input and correct outputas a training set. This requires data to be available beforehand. In a realworld environment however, it is difficult to determine all possible interactionsand provide the correct response to each. The agent thus needs to be able tolearn by itself from the environment to figure out the best reaction in each situation.To facilitate this, the agent needs to be able to sense the environment,make decisions and react back to the environment. The agent repeats this tryingdifferent decisions. To learn from these trials, the agent needs to accumulate oldexperiences, learn and adjust its knowledge and develop progressively after eachinteraction. However, in many applications, experiencing various actions in differentscenarios is difficult, dangerous or even impossible. The agent thereforeneeds an experimental environment where it can safely explore the possibilities,learn from experiences and develop new skills.This research aims to develop a methodology to build an interactive learningagent that can improve its learning performance progressively and perform wellin real world environments. The agent follows the Japanese concept Kaizenwhich refers to activities that continuously improve all functions. It meansstriving for continuous improvement and not radically changing processes. Thecontribution of this research is first to model and develop this agent so thatit can acquire new knowledge based on existing knowledge without negativelyaffecting the old knowledge and skills. Secondly, this research aims to developa novel method to systematically generate synthetic scenarios that contributesto its learning performance.This proposal consists of the background of artificial cognitive systems, acomparison of the theories and approaches in artificial cognitive systems fordeveloping a learning interactive system, and a review of the state of the artin reinforcement learning. Imagination-based learning is discussed and the purposesof imagination are defined. Imagination for creation is used as a scenariogenerator for practicing new skills without the necessity to try them all in thereal world. The research proposal results in the research questions and objectivesto be investigated as well as an outline of the methodology.