Sharing knowledge between tasks is vital for efficient learning in a multi-task setting. However, most research so far has focused on the easier case where knowledge transfer is not harmful, i.e., where knowledge from one task cannot negatively impact the performance on another task. In contrast, we present an approach to multi-task deep reinforcement learning based on attention that does not require any a-priori assumptions about the relationships between tasks. Our attention network automatically groups task knowledge into sub-networks on a state level granularity. It thereby achieves positive knowledge transfer if possible, and avoids negative transfer in cases where tasks interfere. We test our algorithm against two state-of-the-art multi-task transfer learning approaches and show comparable or superior performance while requiring fewer network parameters.
Glatt al @cite_10 train a DQN on a source task and investigate how the learned weights, which are used as initialization for a target task, alter the performance. In a similar manner, @cite_30 @cite_13 @cite_15 show that some transfer is possible by simply training one network on multiple tasks. However, since these algorithms do not incorporate any task-specific weights, the best that can be done is to interpolate between conflicting tasks. In contrast, our method allows conflicting tasks to be learned in separate networks.
@cite_30 @cite_15 @cite_10 @cite_13
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The reinforcement learning (RL) community has made great strides in designing algorithms capable of exceeding human performance on specific tasks. These algorithms are mostly trained one task at the time, each new task requiring to train a brand new agent instance. This means the learning algorithm is general, but each solution is not; each agent can only solve the one task it was trained on. In this work, we study the problem of learning to master not one but multiple sequentialdecision tasks at once. A general issue in multi-task learning is that a balance must be found between the needs of multiple tasks competing for the limited resources of a single learning system. Many learning algorithms can get distracted by certain tasks in the set of tasks to solve. Such tasks appear more salient to the learning process, for instance because of the density or magnitude of the in-task rewards. This causes the algorithm to focus on those salient tasks at the expense of generality. We propose to automatically adapt the contribution of each task to the agent’s updates, so that all tasks have a similar impact on the learning dynamics. This resulted in state of the art performance on learning to play all games in a set of 57 diverse Atari games. Excitingly, our method learned a single trained policy - with a single set of weights - that exceeds median human performance. To our knowledge, this was the first time a single agent surpassed human-level performance on this multi-task domain. The same approach also demonstrated state of the art performance on a set of 30 tasks in the 3D reinforcement learning platform DeepMind Lab. Driven by recent developments in the area of Artificial Intelligence research, a promising new technology for building intelligent agents has evolved. The technology is termed Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and combines the classic field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with the representational power of modern Deep Learning approaches. DRL enables solutions for difficult and high dimensional tasks, such as Atari game playing, for which previously proposed RL methods were inadequate. However, these new solution approaches still take a long time to learn how to actuate in such domains and so far are mainly researched for single task scenarios. The ability to generalize gathered knowledge and transfer it to another task has been researched for classical RL, but remains an open problem for the DRL domain. Consequently, in this article we evaluate under which conditions the application of Transfer Learning (TL) to the DRL domain improves the learning of a new task. Our results indicate that TL can greatly accelerate DRL when transferring knowledge from similar tasks, and that the similarity between tasks plays a key role in the success or failure of knowledge transfer. In this work we aim to solve a large collection of tasks using a single reinforcement learning agent with a single set of parameters. A key challenge is to handle the increased amount of data and extended training time, which is already a problem in single task learning. We have developed a new distributed agent IMPALA (Importance-Weighted Actor Learner Architecture) that can scale to thousands of machines and achieve a throughput rate of 250,000 frames per second. We achieve stable learning at high throughput by combining decoupled acting and learning with a novel off-policy correction method called V-trace, which was critical for achieving learning stability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of IMPALA for multi-task reinforcement learning on DMLab-30 (a set of 30 tasks from the DeepMind Lab environment (, 2016)) and Atari-57 (all available Atari games in Arcade Learning Environment (, 2013a)). Our results show that IMPALA is able to achieve better performance than previous agents, use less data and crucially exhibits positive transfer between tasks as a result of its multi-task approach.