English

Modular Networks Prevent Catastrophic Interference in Model-Based Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2021-11-17 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In a multi-task reinforcement learning setting, the learner commonly benefits from training on multiple related tasks by exploiting similarities among them. At the same time, the trained agent is able to solve a wider range of different problems. While this effect is well documented for model-free multi-task methods, we demonstrate a detrimental effect when using a single learned dynamics model for multiple tasks. Thus, we address the fundamental question of whether model-based multi-task reinforcement learning benefits from shared dynamics models in a similar way model-free methods do from shared policy networks. Using a single dynamics model, we see clear evidence of task confusion and reduced performance. As a remedy, enforcing an internal structure for the learned dynamics model by training isolated sub-networks for each task notably improves performance while using the same amount of parameters. We illustrate our findings by comparing both methods on a simple gridworld and a more complex vizdoom multi-task experiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.08010,
  title  = {Modular Networks Prevent Catastrophic Interference in Model-Based Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Robin Schiewer and Laurenz Wiskott},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.08010},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

15 pages, preprint of a paper presented at the LOD 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:39:26.666Z