English

Learning Reusable Options for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Artificial Intelligence 2020-01-07 v1

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience related to the task at hand might be available. For many practical applications, it might be unfeasible for an agent to learn how to solve a task from scratch, given that it is generally a computationally expensive process; however, prior experience could be leveraged to make these problems tractable in practice. In this paper, we propose a framework for exploiting existing experience by learning reusable options. We show that after an agent learns policies for solving a small number of problems, we are able to use the trajectories generated from those policies to learn reusable options that allow an agent to quickly learn how to solve novel and related problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.01577,
  title  = {Learning Reusable Options for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Francisco M. Garcia and Chris Nota and Philip S. Thomas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.01577},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

15 pages, 7 figures, pre-print