Autonomous learning of abstractions using curiosity-driven modular incremental slow feature analysis

To autonomously learn behaviors in complex environments, vision-based agents need to develop useful sensory abstractions from high-dimensional video. We propose a modular, curiosity-driven learning system that autonomously learns multiple abstract representations. The policy to build the library of abstractions is adapted through reinforcement learning, and the corresponding abstractions are learned through incremental slow-feature analysis (IncSFA). IncSFA learns each abstraction based on how the inputs change over time, directly from unprocessed visual data. Modularity is induced via a gating system, which also prevents abstraction duplication. The system is driven by a curiosity signal that is based on the learnability of the inputs by the current adaptive module. After the learning completes, the result is multiple slow-feature modules serving as distinct behavior-specific abstractions. Experiments with a simulated iCub humanoid robot show how the proposed method effectively learns a set of abstractions from raw un-preprocessed video, to our knowledge the first curious learning agent to demonstrate this ability. © 2012 IEEE.