Explaining intelligent behavior in biological organisms has been one of
holy grails of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Reinforcement
learning (RL) started out as a model of learning in biological systems and
today has grown to be one of the important paradigms of intelligent system
design drawing ideas from varied fields such as neuroscience, psychology,
control theory, operations research and AI. In turn reinforcement learning
has had significant impact in many domains – it is the most popular model
of learning in computational neuroscience and is used to explain different
phenomena observed in the brain; reinforcement learning methods have been
used to build AI agents in domains which were traditionally regarded as
very hard, such as the game of Go; RL has changed the traditional approach
to adaptive optimal control theory by introducing newer ways of modeling
system dynamics; and in robotics, RL is the primary learning paradigm used
for training autonomous agents. From the early beginnings as a theory of
behavioral psychology, over three decades RL has grown into a
mathematically sophisticated field with rigorous underpinnings drawn from
different disciplines. This workshop will introduce the participants to the
basic concepts of reinforcement learning as well as more recent exciting
results in the field from the leaders in the community.