Sharing Knowledge in Multi-Task Deep Reinforcement Learning

Carlo D'Eramo, Davide Tateo, Andrea Bonarini, Marcello Restelli, Jan Peters

Keywords: multi task, reinforcement learning, sample efficiency

Thurs Session 2 (08:00-10:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]
Thurs Session 3 (12:00-14:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]

Abstract: We study the benefit of sharing representations among tasks to enable the effective use of deep neural networks in Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning. We leverage the assumption that learning from different tasks, sharing common properties, is helpful to generalize the knowledge of them resulting in a more effective feature extraction compared to learning a single task. Intuitively, the resulting set of features offers performance benefits when used by Reinforcement Learning algorithms. We prove this by providing theoretical guarantees that highlight the conditions for which is convenient to share representations among tasks, extending the well-known finite-time bounds of Approximate Value-Iteration to the multi-task setting. In addition, we complement our analysis by proposing multi-task extensions of three Reinforcement Learning algorithms that we empirically evaluate on widely used Reinforcement Learning benchmarks showing significant improvements over the single-task counterparts in terms of sample efficiency and performance.

Similar Papers

Keep Doing What Worked: Behavior Modelling Priors for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Noah Siegel, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Felix Berkenkamp, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Michael Neunert, Thomas Lampe, Roland Hafner, Nicolas Heess, Martin Riedmiller,
Is a Good Representation Sufficient for Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning?
Simon S. Du, Sham M. Kakade, Ruosong Wang, Lin F. Yang,
Optimistic Exploration even with a Pessimistic Initialisation
Tabish Rashid, Bei Peng, Wendelin Boehmer, Shimon Whiteson,