To help facilitate play and learning, game-based educational activities often feature a computational agent as a co-player. Personalizing this agent's behavior to the student player is an active area of research, and prior work has demonstrated the benefits of personalized educational interaction across a variety of domains. A critical research challenge for personalized educational agents is real-time student modeling. Most student models are designed for and trained on only a single task, which limits the variety, flexibility, and efficiency of student player model learning. In this paper we present a research project applying transfer learning methods to student player models over different educational tasks, studying the effects of an algorithmic "multi-task personalization" approach on the accuracy and data efficiency of student model learning. We describe a unified robotic game system for studying multi-task personalization over two different educational games, each emphasizing early language and literacy skills such as rhyming and spelling. We present a flexible Gaussian Process-based approach for rapidly learning student models from interactive play in each game, and a method for transferring each game's learned student model to the other via a novel instance-weighting protocol based on task similarity. We present results from a simulation-based investigation of the impact of multi-task personalization, establishing the core viability and benefits of transferrable student models and outlining new questions for future in-person research.
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Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients with Transfer Learning Framework in StarCraft Micromanagement
This paper proposes an intelligent multi-agent approach in a real-time strategy game, StarCraft, based on the deep deterministic policy gradients (DDPG) techniques. An actor and a critic network are established to estimate the optimal control actions and corresponding value functions, respectively. A special reward function is designed based on the agents' own condition and enemies' information to help agents make intelligent control in the game. Furthermore, in order to accelerate the learning process, the transfer learning techniques are integrated into the training process. Specifically, the agents are trained initially in a simple task to learn the basic concept for the combat, such as detouring moving, avoiding and joining attacking. Then, we transfer this experience to the target task with a complex and difficult scenario. From the experiment, it is shown that our proposed algorithm with transfer learning can achieve better performance.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10134286
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 IEEE International Conference on Electro Information Technology (EIT)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 410 to 415
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/EIT.2019.8833742
