---
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.'
altloc: []
chapter: ~
commentary: ~
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confdates: April 23-25
conference: 'ECML-97, European Conference on Machine Learning'
confloc: 'Prague, Czech Republic'
contact_email: ~
creators_id: []
creators_name:
  - family: Baroglio
    given: Cristina
    honourific: ''
    lineage: ''
date: 1997
date_type: published
datestamp: 1999-01-07
department: ~
dir: disk0/00/00/05/28
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editors_id: []
editors_name:
  - family: van Someren
    given: Maarten
    honourific: ''
    lineage: ''
  - family: Widmer
    given: Gerhard
    honourific: ''
    lineage: ''
eprint_status: archive
eprintid: 528
fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/application_postscript.png;/528/2/paper.ps
full_text_status: public
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ispublished: pub
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item_issues_count: 0
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item_issues_reported_by: []
item_issues_resolved_by: []
item_issues_status: []
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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'
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:02
latitude: ~
longitude: ~
metadata_visibility: show
note: ~
number: ~
pagerange: 49-56
pubdom: FALSE
publication: ~
publisher: Springer Verlag
refereed: FALSE
referencetext: ~
relation_type: []
relation_uri: []
reportno: ~
rev_number: 10
series: ~
source: ~
status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:30:10
subjects:
  - behav-anal
  - cog-psy
  - comp-sci-art-intel
  - comp-sci-mach-learn
  - comp-sci-robot
succeeds: ~
suggestions: ~
sword_depositor: ~
sword_slug: ~
thesistype: ~
title: Exploiting qualitative knowledge to enhance skill acquisition
type: confpaper
userid: 194
volume: ~
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