Google open-sources PlaNet, an AI agent that learns about the world from images

But it's not always practical; model-free approaches, which aim to get agents to directly predict actions from observations about their world, can take weeks of training. Model-based reinforcement learning is a viable alternative -- it has agents come up with a general model of their environment they can use to plan ahead. But in order to accurately forecast actions in unfamiliar surroundings, those agents have to formulate rules from experience. Toward that end, Google in collaboration with DeepMind today introduced the Deep Planning Network (PlaNet) agent, which learns a world model from image inputs and leverages it for planning. It's able to solve a variety of image-based tasks with up to 5,000 percent the data efficiency, Google says, while maintaining competitiveness with advanced model-free agents.