Exploring exploration: comparing children with RL agents in unified environments

Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) research, human children are still by far the best learners we know of, learning impressive skills like language and high-level reasoning from very little data. Children's learning is supported by highly efficient, hypothesis-driven exploration: in fact, they explore so well that many machine learning researchers have been inspired to put videos like the one below in their talks to motivate research into exploration methods. However, because applying results from studies in developmental psychology can be difficult, this video is often the extent to which such research actually connects with human cognition. Why is directly applying research from developmental psychology to problems in AI so hard? For one, taking inspiration from developmental studies can be difficult because the environments that human children and artificial agents are typically studied in can be very different. Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) research takes place in grid-world-like settings or other 2D games, whereas children act in the real world which is rich and 3-dimensional.