A Versatile Agent for Fast Learning from Human Instructors
This addresses the need for fast, flexible learning in robotics, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing hierarchical and demonstration-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient and non-transferable robotics policies in human-robot collaboration by proposing an agent that uses a 'Policy Pool' of pre-trained skills, enabling it to learn a sparse-reward, multi-stage task from a single human demonstration in a Mini-Grid environment.
In recent years, a myriad of superlative works on intelligent robotics policies have been done, thanks to advances in machine learning. However, inefficiency and lack of transfer ability hindered algorithms from pragmatic applications, especially in human-robot collaboration, when few-shot fast learning and high flexibility become a wherewithal. To surmount this obstacle, we refer to a "Policy Pool", containing pre-trained skills that can be easily accessed and reused. An agent is employed to govern the "Policy Pool" by unfolding requisite skills in a flexible sequence, contingent on task specific predilection. This predilection can be automatically interpreted from one or few human expert demonstrations. Under this hierarchical setting, our algorithm is able to pick up a sparse-reward, multi-stage knack with only one demonstration in a Mini-Grid environment, showing the potential for instantly mastering complex robotics skills from human instructors. Additionally, the innate quality of our algorithm also allows for lifelong learning, making it a versatile agent.