Title: Boosting Reinforcement Learning in 3D Visuospatial Tasks Through Human-Informed Curriculum Design
Primary area: reinforcement learning
Keywords: Visuospatial Problem-Solving, Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning, Same-Different, Curriculum Learning

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning is a mature technology, often suggested as a potential route towards Artificial General Intelligence, with the ambitious goal of replicating the wide range of abilities found in natural and artificial intelligence, including the complexities of human cognition. While RL had shown successes in relatively constrained environments, such as the classic Atari games and specific continuous control problems, recent years have seen efforts to expand its applicability. This work investigates the potential of RL in demonstrating intelligent behaviour and its progress in addressing more complex and less structured problem domains.

We present an investigation into the capacity of modern RL frameworks in addressing a seemingly straightforward 3D Same-Different visuospatial task. While initial applications of state-of-the-art methods, including PPO, behavioural cloning and imitation learning, revealed challenges in directly learning optimal strategies, the successful implementation of curriculum learning offers a promising avenue. Effective learning was achieved by strategically designing the lesson plan based on the findings of a real-world human experiment.

TL;DR: This study demonstrates that while modern reinforcement learning methods initially struggle with a 3D same-different visuospatial task, a curriculum learning approach, informed by human experiments, can successfully teach the model to solve it.