This paper proposes an online transfer framework to capture the interaction among agents and shows that current transfer learning in reinforcement learning is a special case of online transfer. Furthermore, this paper re-characterizes existing agents-teaching-agents methods as online transfer and analyze one such teaching method in three ways. First, the convergence of Q-learning and Sarsa with tabular representation with a finite budget is proven. Second, the convergence of Q-learning and Sarsa with linear function approximation is established. Third, the we show the asymptotic performance cannot be hurt through teaching. Additionally, all theoretical results are empirically validated.
Transfer learning in reinforcement domain has been studies recently @cite_22 @cite_19 . Lazaric introduces a transfer learning framework which inspires us to develop the online transfer learning framework and classifies transfer learning in reinforcement domain into three categories: instance transfer, representation transfer and parameter transfer @cite_19 . The action advice model is a method of instance transfer due to explicit action advice (i.e., sample transfer). Lazaric proposed an instance-transfer method which selectively transfers samples on the basis of the similarity between source and target tasks @cite_20 .
@cite_19 @cite_22 @cite_20
158722652 2097381042 2004030284
Transfer in reinforcement learning is a novel research area that focuses on the development of methods to transfer knowledge from a set of source tasks to a target task. Whenever the tasks are similar, the transferred knowledge can be used by a learning algorithm to solve the target task and significantly improve its performance (e.g., by reducing the number of samples needed to achieve a nearly optimal performance). In this chapter we provide a formalization of the general transfer problem, we identify the main settings which have been investigated so far, and we review the most important approaches to transfer in reinforcement learning. The reinforcement learning paradigm is a popular way to address problems that have only limited environmental feedback, rather than correctly labeled examples, as is common in other machine learning contexts. While significant progress has been made to improve learning in a single task, the idea of transfer learning has only recently been applied to reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of transfer is that experience gained in learning to perform one task can help improve learning performance in a related, but different, task. In this article we present a framework that classifies transfer learning methods in terms of their capabilities and goals, and then use it to survey the existing literature, as well as to suggest future directions for transfer learning work. The main objective of transfer in reinforcement learning is to reduce the complexity of learning the solution of a target task by effectively reusing the knowledge retained from solving a set of source tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm that transfers samples (i.e., tuples 〈s, a, s', r〉) from source to target tasks. Under the assumption that tasks have similar transition models and reward functions, we propose a method to select samples from the source tasks that are mostly similar to the target task, and, then, to use them as input for batch reinforcement-learning algorithms. As a result, the number of samples an agent needs to collect from the target task to learn its solution is reduced. We empirically show that, following the proposed approach, the transfer of samples is effective in reducing the learning complexity, even when some source tasks are significantly different from the target task.