Autonomous inter-task transfer in reinforcement learning domains

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have become popular in recent years because of their ability to solve complex tasks with minimal feedback. While these methods have had experimental successes and have been shown to exhibit some desirable properties in theory, the basic learning algorithms have often been found slow in practice. Therefore, much of the current RL research focuses on speeding up learning by taking advantage of domain knowledge, or by better utilizing agents’ experience. The ambitious goal of transfer learning, when applied to RL tasks, is to accelerate learning on some target task after training on a different, but related, source task. This dissertation demonstrates that transfer learning methods can successfully improve learning in RL tasks via experience from previously learned tasks. Transfer learning can increase RL’s applicability to difficult tasks by allowing agents to generalize their experience across learning problems. This dissertation presents inter-task mappings, the first transfer mechanism in this area to successfully enable transfer between tasks with different state variables and actions. Inter-task mappings have subsequently been used by a number of transfer researchers. A set of six transfer learning algorithms are then introduced. While these transfer methods differ in terms of what base RL algorithms they are compatible with, what type of knowledge they transfer, and what their strengths are, all utilize the same inter-task mapping mechanism. These transfer methods can all successfully use mappings constructed by a human from domain knowledge, but there may be situations in which domain knowledge is unavailable, or insufficient, to describe how two given tasks are related. We therefore also study how inter-task mappings can be learned autonomously by leveraging existing machine learning algorithms. Our methods use classification and regression techniques to successfully discover similarities between data gathered in pairs of tasks, culminating in what is currently one of the most robust mapping-learning algorithms for RL transfer. Combining transfer methods with these similarity-learning algorithms allows us to empirically demonstrate the plausibility of autonomous transfer. We fully implement these methods in four domains (each with different salient characteristics), show that transfer can significantly improve an agent’s ability to learn in each domain, and explore the limits of transfer’s applicability.