Effect of human guidance and state space size on Interactive Reinforcement Learning

The Interactive Reinforcement Learning algorithm enables a human user to train a robot by providing rewards in response to past actions and anticipatory guidance to guide the selection of future actions. Past work with software agents has shown that incorporating user guidance into the policy learning process through Interactive Reinforcement Learning significantly improves the policy learning time by reducing the number of states the agent explores. We present the first study of Interactive Reinforcement Learning in real-world robotic systems. We report on four experiments that study the effects that teacher guidance and state space size have on policy learning performance. We discuss modifications made to apply Interactive Reinforcement Learning to a real-world system and show that guidance significantly reduces the learning rate, and that its positive effects increase with state space size.