{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/intrinsically-motivated-open-ended-multi-task","title":"Intrinsically Motivated Open-Ended Multi-Task Learning Using Transfer Learning to Discover Task Hierarchy","arxiv_id":"2102.09854","date":"2021-02-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nicolas Duminy","Sao Mai Nguyen","Junshuai Zhu","Dominique Duhaut","Jerome Kerdreux"],"abstract":"In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from simpler tasks, and faster by adapting the complexity of the actions to the task. We propose a task-oriented representation of complex actions, called procedures, to learn online task relationships and unbounded sequences of action primitives to control the different observables of the environment. Combining both goal-babbling with imitation learning, and active learning with transfer of knowledge based on intrinsic motivation, our algorithm self-organises its learning process. It chooses at any given time a task to focus on; and what, how, when and from whom to transfer knowledge. We show with a simulation and a real industrial robot arm, in cross-task and cross-learner transfer settings, that task composition is key to tackle highly complex tasks. Task decomposition is also efficiently transferred across different embodied learners and by active imitation, where the robot requests just a small amount of demonstrations and the adequate type of information. The robot learns and exploits task dependencies so as to learn tasks of every complexity.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09854v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.09854v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"intrinsically-motivated-open-ended-multi-task","repo_url":"https://bitbucket.org/smartan117/sgim-yumi-simu","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"active-learning","task_name":"Active Learning"},{"task_slug":"hierarchical-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"imitation-learning","task_name":"Imitation Learning"},{"task_slug":"multi-task-learning","task_name":"Multi-Task Learning"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}