Autonomous Learning of State Representations for Control: An Emerging Field Aims to Autonomously Learn State Representations for Reinforcement Learning Agents from Their Real-World Sensor Observations

This article reviews an emerging field that aims for autonomous reinforcement learning (RL) directly on sensor-observations. Straightforward end-to-end RL has recently shown remarkable success, but relies on large amounts of samples. As this is not feasible in robotics, we review two approaches to learn intermediate state representations from previous experiences: deep auto-encoders and slow-feature analysis. We analyze theoretical properties of the representations and point to potential improvements. © 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.