Virtual institutions: Normative environments facilitating imitation learning in virtual agents

Abstract

The most popular two methods of extending the intelligence of virtual agents are explicit programming of the agents' decision making apparatus and learning agent behaviors from humans or other agents. The major obstacles of the existing approaches are making the agent understand the environment it is situated in and interpreting the actions and goals of other participants. Instead of trying to solve these problems we propose to formalize the environment in a way that these problems are minimized. The proposed solution, called Virtual Institutions, facilitates formalization of participants' interactions inside Virtual Worlds, helping the agent to interpret the actions of other participants, understand its options and determine the goals of the principal that is conducting the training of the agent. Such formalization creates facilities to express the principal's goals during training, as well as establishes a way to communicate desires of the human to the agent once the training is completed. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.