PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Finding good principles to choose the actions of artificial agents like robots in the most beneficial way to optimize their control of the environment is very much in the focus of current research in the field of intelligent systems. Especially in reinforcement learning, where the agent learns through the direct interaction with the environment, a good choice of actions is essential. We propose a new approach that allows a predictive ranking of different action sets with regard to their influence on the learning performance of an artificial agent. Our approach is based on a measure of control that utilizes the concept of mutual information. To evaluate this approach, we investigate its prediction of the effectiveness of different sets of actions in “mediated interaction” scenarios. Our results indicate that the mutual information-based measure can yield useful predictions on the aptitude of action sets for the learning process.