creators_name: Baroglio, Cristina editors_name: van Someren, Maarten editors_name: Widmer, Gerhard type: confpaper datestamp: 1999-01-07 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:02 metadata_visibility: show title: Exploiting qualitative knowledge to enhance skill acquisition ispublished: pub subjects: behav-anal subjects: cog-psy subjects: comp-sci-art-intel subjects: comp-sci-mach-learn subjects: comp-sci-robot full_text_status: public keywords: skill acquisition, knowledge-based feedback, adaptive agents, agent teaching, behaviour formation, qualitative knowledge use, symbolic/non-symbolic gap, hybrid systems, neural networks, reinforcement learning abstract: One of the most interesting problems faced by Artificial Intelligence researchers is to reproduce a capability typical of living beings: that of learning to perform motor tasks, a problem known as skill acquisition. A very difficult purpose because the overwhole behavior of an agent is the result of quite a complex activity, involving sensory, planning and motor processing. In this paper, I present a novel approach for acquiring new skills, named Soft Teaching, that is characterized by a learning by experience process, in which an agent exploits a symbolic, qualitative description of the task to perform, that cannot, however, be used directly for control purposes. A specific Soft Teaching technique, named Symmetries, was implemented and tested against a continuous-domained version of well-known pole-balancing. date: 1997 date_type: published publisher: Springer Verlag pagerange: 49-56 refereed: FALSE citation: Baroglio, Cristina (1997) Exploiting qualitative knowledge to enhance skill acquisition. [Conference Paper] document_url: http://cogprints.org/528/2/paper.ps