Using Emotions as Intrinsic Motivation to Accelerate Classic Reinforcement Learning

Aiming at the need for autonomous learning in reinforcement learning (RL), a quantitative emotion-based motivation model is proposed by introducing psychological emotional factors as the intrinsic motivation. The curiosity is used to promote or hold back agents' exploration of unknown states, the happiness index is used to determine the current state-action's happiness level, the control power is used to indicate agents' control ability over its surrounding environment, and together to adjust agents' learning preferences and behavioral patterns. To combine intrinsic emotional motivations with classic RL, two methods are proposed. The first method is to use the intrinsic emotional motivations to explore unknown environment and learn the environment transitioning model ahead of time, while the second method is to combine intrinsic emotional motivations with external rewards as the ultimate joint reward function, directly to drive agents' learning. As the result shows, in the simulation experiments in the rat foraging in maze scenario, both methods have achieved relatively good performance, compared with classic RL purely driven by external rewards.