Never-Ending Learning

There exists a stark difference between today’s machine learning methods and the lifelong learning capabilities of humans. Humans learn many different functions and skills, from diverse experiences gained over many years, from a staged curriculum in which they first learn easier and later more difficult tasks, retain the learned knowledge and skills, which are used in subsequent learning to make it easier or more effective. Furthermore, humans self-reflect on their evolving skills, choose new learning tasks over time, teach one another, learn new representations, read books, discuss competing hypotheses, and more. This tutorial will focus on the question of how to design machine learning agents with similar capabilities. The tutorial will include research on topics such as reinforcement learning and other agent learning architectures, transfer and multi-task learning, representation learning, amortized learning, learning by natural language instruction and demonstration, learning from experimentation.