On The Necessity of Abstraction

A generally intelligent agent faces a dilemma: it requires a complex sensorimotor space to be capable of solving a wide range of problems, but many tasks are only feasible given the right problem-specific formulation. I argue that a necessary but understudied requirement for general intelligence is the ability to form task-specific abstract representations. I show that the reinforcement learning paradigm structures this question into how to learn action abstractions and how to learn state abstractions, and discuss the field's progress on these topics.