Salesforce research

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is a popular and successful family of methods for teaching computers tasks ranging from playing Go and Atari games to controlling industrial robots. But it is difficult to use a single neural network and conventional RL techniques to learn many different skills at once. Existing approaches usually treat the tasks independently or attempt to transfer knowledge between a pair of tasks, but this prevents full exploration of the underlying relationships between different tasks. When humans learn new skills, we take advantage of our existing skills and build new capabilities by composing and combining simpler ones. For instance, learning multi-digit multiplication relies on knowledge of single-digit multiplication, while knowing how to properly prepare individual ingredients facilitates cooking dishes with complex recipes.