Towards incremental learning of task-dependent action sequences using probabilistic parsing

Abstract

We study an incremental process of learning where a set of generic basic actions are used to learn higher-level task-dependent action sequences. A task-dependent action sequence is learned by associating the goal given by a human demonstrator with the task-independent, general-purpose actions in the action repertoire. This process of contextualization is done using probabilistic parsing. We propose stochastic context-free grammars as the representational framework due to its robustness to noise, structural flexibility, and easiness on defining task-independent actions. We demonstrate our implementation on a real-world scenario using a humanoid robot and report implementation issues we had.