Combining Pre-Trained Models for Enhanced Feature Representation in Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Piccoli, Elia, Li, Malio, Carfì, Giacomo, Lomonaco, Vincenzo, Bacciu, Davide
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908442823753728
author Piccoli, Elia
Li, Malio
Carfì, Giacomo
Lomonaco, Vincenzo
Bacciu, Davide
author_facet Piccoli, Elia
Li, Malio
Carfì, Giacomo
Lomonaco, Vincenzo
Bacciu, Davide
contents The recent focus and release of pre-trained models have been a key components to several advancements in many fields (e.g. Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision), as a matter of fact, pre-trained models learn disparate latent embeddings sharing insightful representations. On the other hand, Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on maximizing the cumulative reward obtained via agent's interaction with the environment. RL agents do not have any prior knowledge about the world, and they either learn from scratch an end-to-end mapping between the observation and action spaces or, in more recent works, are paired with monolithic and computationally expensive Foundational Models. How to effectively combine and leverage the hidden information of different pre-trained models simultaneously in RL is still an open and understudied question. In this work, we propose Weight Sharing Attention (WSA), a new architecture to combine embeddings of multiple pre-trained models to shape an enriched state representation, balancing the tradeoff between efficiency and performance. We run an extensive comparison between several combination modes showing that WSA obtains comparable performance on multiple Atari games compared to end-to-end models. Furthermore, we study the generalization capabilities of this approach and analyze how scaling the number of models influences agents' performance during and after training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_07197
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Combining Pre-Trained Models for Enhanced Feature Representation in Reinforcement Learning
Piccoli, Elia
Li, Malio
Carfì, Giacomo
Lomonaco, Vincenzo
Bacciu, Davide
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The recent focus and release of pre-trained models have been a key components to several advancements in many fields (e.g. Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision), as a matter of fact, pre-trained models learn disparate latent embeddings sharing insightful representations. On the other hand, Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on maximizing the cumulative reward obtained via agent's interaction with the environment. RL agents do not have any prior knowledge about the world, and they either learn from scratch an end-to-end mapping between the observation and action spaces or, in more recent works, are paired with monolithic and computationally expensive Foundational Models. How to effectively combine and leverage the hidden information of different pre-trained models simultaneously in RL is still an open and understudied question. In this work, we propose Weight Sharing Attention (WSA), a new architecture to combine embeddings of multiple pre-trained models to shape an enriched state representation, balancing the tradeoff between efficiency and performance. We run an extensive comparison between several combination modes showing that WSA obtains comparable performance on multiple Atari games compared to end-to-end models. Furthermore, we study the generalization capabilities of this approach and analyze how scaling the number of models influences agents' performance during and after training.
title Combining Pre-Trained Models for Enhanced Feature Representation in Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07197