Show me the Way: Intrinsic Motivation from Demonstrations

Understand

The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated.

• From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology, experimental design, artificial intelligence), intrinsic motivation emerged as a concept that can practically be transferred to artificial agents.
• Especially, in the recent field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents implement such a concept (mainly using a novelty argument) in the shape of an exploration bonus, added to the task reward, that encourages visiting the whole environment.
• This approach is supported by the large amount of theory on RL for which convergence to optimality assumes exhaustive exploration.