Title: Learning to Teach Reinforcement Learning Agents,
Abstract: In this article we study the transfer learning model of action advice under a
budget. We focus on reinforcement learning teachers providing action advice to
heterogeneous students playing the game of Pac-Man under a limited advice
budget. First, we examine several critical factors affecting advice quality in
this setting, such as the average performance of the teacher, its variance and
the importance of reward discounting in advising. The experiments show the
non-trivial importance of the coefficient of variation (CV) as a statistic for
choosing policies that generate advice. The CV statistic relates variance to
the corresponding mean. Second, the article studies policy learning for
distributing advice under a budget. Whereas most methods in the relevant
literature rely on heuristics for advice distribution we formulate the problem
as a learning one and propose a novel RL algorithm capable of learning when to
advise, adapting to the student and the task at hand. Furthermore, we argue
that learning to advise under a budget is an instance of a more generic
learning problem: Constrained Exploitation Reinforcement Learning.