Associative Reinforcement Learning - A Proposal to Build Truly Adaptive Agents and Multi-agent Systems

In this position paper we propose to enhance learning algorithms, reinforcement learning in particular, for agents and for multi-agent systems, with the introduction of concepts and mechanisms borrowed from associative learning theory. It is argued that existing algorithms are limited in that they adopt a very restricted view of what “learning” is, partly due to the constraints imposed by the Markov assumption upon which they are built. Interestingly, psychological theories of associative learning account for a wide range of social behaviours, making it an ideal framework to model learning in single agent scenarios as well as in multi-agent domains.