Autonomous Exploration For Navigating In MDPs

While intrinsically motivated learning agents hold considerable promise to overcome limitations of more supervised learning systems, quantitative evaluation and theoretical analysis of such agents are difficult. We propose to consider a restricted setting for autonomous learning where systematic evaluation of learning performance is possible. In this setting the agent needs to learn to navigate in a Markov Decision Process where extrinsic rewards are not present or are ignored. We present a learning algorithm for this scenario and evaluate it by the amount of exploration it uses to learn the environment.