An advantage based policy transfer algorithm for reinforcement learning with measures of transferability

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Alam, Md Ferdous, Naghizadeh, Parinaz, Hoelzle, David
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Alam, Md Ferdous
Naghizadeh, Parinaz
Hoelzle, David
author_facet Alam, Md Ferdous
Naghizadeh, Parinaz
Hoelzle, David
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) enables sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments through interaction with the environment. In most real-world applications, however, a high number of interactions are infeasible. In these environments, transfer RL algorithms, which can be used for the transfer of knowledge from one or multiple source environments to a target environment, have been shown to increase learning speed and improve initial and asymptotic performance. However, most existing transfer RL algorithms are on-policy and sample inefficient, fail in adversarial target tasks, and often require heuristic choices in algorithm design. This paper proposes an off-policy Advantage-based Policy Transfer algorithm, APT-RL, for fixed domain environments. Its novelty is in using the popular notion of ``advantage'' as a regularizer, to weigh the knowledge that should be transferred from the source, relative to new knowledge learned in the target, removing the need for heuristic choices. Further, we propose a new transfer performance measure to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and unify existing transfer RL frameworks. Finally, we present a scalable, theoretically-backed task similarity measurement algorithm to illustrate the alignments between our proposed transferability measure and similarities between source and target environments. We compare APT-RL with several baselines, including existing transfer-RL algorithms, in three high-dimensional continuous control tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that APT-RL outperforms existing transfer RL algorithms and is at least as good as learning from scratch in adversarial tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_06731
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An advantage based policy transfer algorithm for reinforcement learning with measures of transferability
Alam, Md Ferdous
Naghizadeh, Parinaz
Hoelzle, David
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments through interaction with the environment. In most real-world applications, however, a high number of interactions are infeasible. In these environments, transfer RL algorithms, which can be used for the transfer of knowledge from one or multiple source environments to a target environment, have been shown to increase learning speed and improve initial and asymptotic performance. However, most existing transfer RL algorithms are on-policy and sample inefficient, fail in adversarial target tasks, and often require heuristic choices in algorithm design. This paper proposes an off-policy Advantage-based Policy Transfer algorithm, APT-RL, for fixed domain environments. Its novelty is in using the popular notion of ``advantage'' as a regularizer, to weigh the knowledge that should be transferred from the source, relative to new knowledge learned in the target, removing the need for heuristic choices. Further, we propose a new transfer performance measure to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and unify existing transfer RL frameworks. Finally, we present a scalable, theoretically-backed task similarity measurement algorithm to illustrate the alignments between our proposed transferability measure and similarities between source and target environments. We compare APT-RL with several baselines, including existing transfer-RL algorithms, in three high-dimensional continuous control tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that APT-RL outperforms existing transfer RL algorithms and is at least as good as learning from scratch in adversarial tasks.
title An advantage based policy transfer algorithm for reinforcement learning with measures of transferability
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06731