Apparatus for adding new learning tasks to an incremental supervised learner provides a flexible incremental representation of all encountered training examples, thereby permitting state representations for new learning tasks to take advantage of incremental training already completed by encoding all past training examples as negative examples for a hypothetical learning task. The state representation of the hypothetical learning task is copied as the initial state representation for a new learning task to be initiated, and is initialized with negative training examples of all previously presented training examples, thereby permitting the learning task to efficiently incorporate the previous examples.