Artificial Intelligence

How Can we make Intelligent Agent

Learning and Agents

Lecture 4

Lecture Outlines
Learning Definition
Intelligent Agents should learn!

How can an Agent Learn!

Learning Components (Architecture of Learning in Agents)
Learning Classes and Types
Methods of Learning

What is Learning!
Learning is the acquisition of knowledge or skills through

experience, study, or by being taught.

Learning is acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing, existing

knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may

involve synthesizing different types of information.

The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some

machines.

Rational/Intelligent Agent
A rational agent needs both gathering information and learn as

much as possible from what is perceives.

Information gathering helps the agent to modify future percept by

doing actions and by the exploration

The agents initial configuration could reflect some prior

knowledge of the environment, but as the agent gains

experience this may be modified and increased.

Why Learning!
All intelligence comes from the designer:
Time consuming for designer!
Restricts capabilities of agent

Learning agents can:

Act autonomously
Deal with unknown environments
Synthesise rules/patterns from large volumes of data
Handle complex data

Improve their own performance

So.
Learning is essential for unknown environments

i.e., when designer lacks omniscience

Learning is useful as a system construction method
i.e., expose the agent to reality rather than trying to write it
down
Learning modifies the agents decision mechanisms to
improve performance

How an Agent Learn

Acquisition of new knowledge and skills on the agents own

initiative
Incorporation of new knowledge into the existing knowledge
Performed by the system itself not only injected by the

developer
Performance improvement simply accumulating knowledge
isnt sufficient

Agent Learning Components

Agent Learning Components

Learning Components
Performance element
Responsible for selecting actions for
good agent performance
Agent function considered previously:
perceptsactions
Learning element
Responsible for improving performance
element
Require feedback on how the agent is
doing

Learning Components
Critic element
Responsible for providing feedback
Comparison
performance

with

objective

standard

(outside

agent)
Problem generator
Responsible for generating new
experience
Requires

exploration

suboptimal actions

taking

Learning Components
Design of learning element is dictated by:

What type of performance element is used

Which functional component is to be learned
How that functional component is represented
What kind of feedback is available

Prior information available

Performance element
The performance element can use
Direct mapping from states to actions

Means to infer properties of the world from percept sequence

Information on how the world evolves
Information about how actions change the world
Utility information about desirability of states
Action-value information about desirability of actions in

states
Goals whose achievement maximizes utility

Learning Types (Feedback)

We conventionally classify learning into three increasingly difficult classes:
Supervised learning

Agent provided with both inputs and correct outputs

Usually by a teacher
Reinforcement learning
Agent chooses actions
Receives some reward or punishment
Unsupervised learning

No hint about correct outputs

Can only learn relationships between percepts

Representation of Learning
Learning

algorithms need to be adapted to a particular

representation of learning
Representation may be forms:
Deterministic
Linear weighted polynomials
Logic

Propositional, first-order
Probabilistic
Belief networks, decision theory

Methods of Learning
Inductive learning
Learning from examples

Reflex agent
Decision trees
Deriving decisions from examples
take a situation described by a set of properties, and produce a
yes/no decision
Neural Networks

Genetic Algorithms