Autonomous transfer for reinforcement learning

  • Authors:
  • Matthew E. Taylor;Gregory Kuhlmann;Peter Stone

  • Affiliations:
  • The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas;The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas;The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Recent work in transfer learning has succeeded in making reinforcement learning algorithms more efficient by incorporating knowledge from previous tasks. However, such methods typically must be provided either a full model of the tasks or an explicit relation mapping one task into the other. An autonomous agent may not have access to such high-level information, but would be able to analyze its experience to find similarities between tasks. In this paper we introduce Modeling Approximate State Transitions by Exploiting Regression (MASTER), a method for automatically learning a mapping from one task to another through an agent's experience. We empirically demonstrate that such learned relationships can significantly improve the speed of a reinforcement learning algorithm in a series of Mountain Car tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method may also assist with the difficult problem of task selection for transfer.