Efficient Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Cross-Task Policy Guidance

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: He, Jinmin, Li, Kai, Zang, Yifan, Fu, Haobo, Fu, Qiang, Xing, Junliang, Cheng, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911047159382016
author He, Jinmin
Li, Kai
Zang, Yifan
Fu, Haobo
Fu, Qiang
Xing, Junliang
Cheng, Jian
author_facet He, Jinmin
Li, Kai
Zang, Yifan
Fu, Haobo
Fu, Qiang
Xing, Junliang
Cheng, Jian
contents Multi-task reinforcement learning endeavors to efficiently leverage shared information across various tasks, facilitating the simultaneous learning of multiple tasks. Existing approaches primarily focus on parameter sharing with carefully designed network structures or tailored optimization procedures. However, they overlook a direct and complementary way to exploit cross-task similarities: the control policies of tasks already proficient in some skills can provide explicit guidance for unmastered tasks to accelerate skills acquisition. To this end, we present a novel framework called Cross-Task Policy Guidance (CTPG), which trains a guide policy for each task to select the behavior policy interacting with the environment from all tasks' control policies, generating better training trajectories. In addition, we propose two gating mechanisms to improve the learning efficiency of CTPG: one gate filters out control policies that are not beneficial for guidance, while the other gate blocks tasks that do not necessitate guidance. CTPG is a general framework adaptable to existing parameter sharing approaches. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that incorporating CTPG with these approaches significantly enhances performance in manipulation and locomotion benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06615
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Cross-Task Policy Guidance
He, Jinmin
Li, Kai
Zang, Yifan
Fu, Haobo
Fu, Qiang
Xing, Junliang
Cheng, Jian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Multi-task reinforcement learning endeavors to efficiently leverage shared information across various tasks, facilitating the simultaneous learning of multiple tasks. Existing approaches primarily focus on parameter sharing with carefully designed network structures or tailored optimization procedures. However, they overlook a direct and complementary way to exploit cross-task similarities: the control policies of tasks already proficient in some skills can provide explicit guidance for unmastered tasks to accelerate skills acquisition. To this end, we present a novel framework called Cross-Task Policy Guidance (CTPG), which trains a guide policy for each task to select the behavior policy interacting with the environment from all tasks' control policies, generating better training trajectories. In addition, we propose two gating mechanisms to improve the learning efficiency of CTPG: one gate filters out control policies that are not beneficial for guidance, while the other gate blocks tasks that do not necessitate guidance. CTPG is a general framework adaptable to existing parameter sharing approaches. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that incorporating CTPG with these approaches significantly enhances performance in manipulation and locomotion benchmarks.
title Efficient Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Cross-Task Policy Guidance
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06615