English

The Intentional Unintentional Agent: Learning to Solve Many Continuous Control Tasks Simultaneously

Artificial Intelligence 2017-07-12 v1

Abstract

This paper introduces the Intentional Unintentional (IU) agent. This agent endows the deep deterministic policy gradients (DDPG) agent for continuous control with the ability to solve several tasks simultaneously. Learning to solve many tasks simultaneously has been a long-standing, core goal of artificial intelligence, inspired by infant development and motivated by the desire to build flexible robot manipulators capable of many diverse behaviours. We show that the IU agent not only learns to solve many tasks simultaneously but it also learns faster than agents that target a single task at-a-time. In some cases, where the single task DDPG method completely fails, the IU agent successfully solves the task. To demonstrate this, we build a playroom environment using the MuJoCo physics engine, and introduce a grounded formal language to automatically generate tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.03300,
  title  = {The Intentional Unintentional Agent: Learning to Solve Many Continuous Control Tasks Simultaneously},
  author = {Serkan Cabi and Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo and Matthew W. Hoffman and Misha Denil and Ziyu Wang and Nando de Freitas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.03300},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:43:37.668Z