Active Incremental Learning of a Contextual Skill Model

Abstract

Contextual skill models are learned to provide skills over a range of task parameters, often using regression across optimal task-specific policies. However, the sequential nature of the learning process is usually neglected. In this paper, we propose to use active incremental learning by selecting a task which maximizes performance improvement over entire task set. The proposed framework exploits knowledge of individual tasks accumulated in a database and shares it among the tasks using a contextual skill model. The framework is agnostic to the type of policy representation, skill model, and policy search. We evaluated the skill improvement rate in two tasks, ball-in-a-cup and basketball. In both, active selection of tasks lead to a consistent improvement in skill performance over a baseline.