  As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon
for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to
continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming
Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves
minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's
capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong
reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in
L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than
developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the
systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to
integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we
introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF),
which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning
components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem)
into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API
allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a
case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components
can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an
evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various
system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios
(sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the
fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of
components within a challenging common evaluation environment.
