Decoupled Learning of Environment Characteristics for Safe Exploration
  Reinforcement learning is a proven technique for an agent to learn a task.
However, when learning a task using reinforcement learning, the agent cannot
distinguish the characteristics of the environment from those of the task. This
makes it harder to transfer skills between tasks in the same environment.
Furthermore, this does not reduce risk when training for a new task. In this
paper, we introduce an approach to decouple the environment characteristics
from the task-specific ones, allowing an agent to develop a sense of survival.
We evaluate our approach in an environment where an agent must learn a sequence
of collection tasks, and show that decoupled learning allows for a safer
utilization of prior knowledge.
