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<article-title>IFSA: Incremental Feature-Set Augmentation for Reinforcement Learning Tasks</article-title></title-group>

<author><a href="mailto:mazda@cs.utexas.edu"><name>Mazda Ahmadi</name></a></author>
<aff>Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1188</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:mtaylor@cs.utexas.edu"><name>Matthew E. Taylor</name></a></author>
<aff>Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1188</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:pstone@cs.utexas.edu"><name>Peter Stone</name></a></author>
<aff>Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1188</aff>
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<abstract>
<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>Reinforcement learning is a popular and successful framework for
many agent-related problems because only limited environmental
feedback is necessary for learning. While many algorithms exist to
learn effective policies in such problems, learning is often used to
solve real world problems, which typically have large state spaces,
and therefore suffer from the "curse of dimensionality." One effectivemethod
for speeding-up reinforcement learning algorithms is to
leverage expert knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method for
dynamically augmenting the agent's feature set in order to speed
up value-function-based reinforcement learning. The domain expert
divides the feature set into a series of subsets such that a novel
problem concept can be learned from each successive subset. Domain
knowledge is also used to order the feature subsets in order
of their importance for learning. Our algorithm uses the ordered
feature subsets to learn tasks significantly faster than if the entire
feature set is used from the start. Incremental Feature-Set Augmentation
(IFSA) is fully implemented and tested in three different
domains: Gridworld, Blackjack and RoboCup Soccer Keepaway.
All experiments show that IFSA can significantly speed up learning
and motivates the applicability of this novel RL method.</p>
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