A lot of recent machine learning research papers have "Open-ended learning" in their title. But very few of them attempt to define what they mean when using the term. Even worse, when looking more closely there seems to be no consensus on what distinguishes open-ended learning from related concepts such as continual learning, lifelong learning or autotelic learning. In this paper, we contribute to fixing this situation. After illustrating the genealogy of the concept and more recent perspectives about what it truly means, we outline that open-ended learning is generally conceived as a composite notion encompassing a set of diverse properties. In contrast with these previous approaches, we propose to isolate a key elementary property of open-ended processes, which is to always produce novel elements from time to time over an infinite horizon. From there, we build the notion of open-ended learning problems and focus in particular on the subset of open-ended goal-conditioned reinforcement learning problems, as this framework facilitates the definition of learning a growing repertoire of skills. Finally, we highlight the work that remains to be performed to fill the gap between our elementary definition and the more involved notions of open-ended learning that developmental AI researchers may have in mind.

开放式学习是一个复合概念，其核心特性是在无限时间内不断产生新元素，并以开放式目标条件下的强化学习问题为重点研究领域。该研究旨在定义开放式学习的基本属性，并探讨其与相关概念的区别与联系，以填补目前在发展性人工智能研究中的知识空白。

目标条件智能体开放式学习问题定义