AI engineering glossary · Reinforcement learning
What is continuing task?
Continuing task: A problem that never reaches a natural end, so the interaction goes on indefinitely. Because total score would be unbounded, such problems need discounting or an average-per-step objective to keep values finite.
Continuing task: an example
A data-centre cooling controller runs day and night with no final situation, so it maximises discounted savings or average savings per hour.
Related terms
- Episodic task
- Discount factor
- Average reward
- Return
More Reinforcement learning terms
- Count-based exploration
- Credit assignment
- Curiosity-driven exploration
- DAgger
- Deadly triad
- Deep deterministic policy gradient
- Deep Q-network
- Deterministic policy
Where you learn it
Continuing task is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.