Towards Knowledge Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Driven by recent developments in the area of Artificial Intelligence research, a promising new technology for building intelligent agents has evolved. The technology is termed Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and combines the classic field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with the representational power of modern Deep Learning approaches. DRL enables solutions for difficult and high dimensional tasks, such as Atari game playing, for which previously proposed RL methods were inadequate. However, these new solution approaches still take a long time to learn how to actuate in such domains and so far are mainly researched for single task scenarios. The ability to generalize gathered knowledge and transfer it to another task has been researched for classical RL, but remains an open problem for the DRL domain. Consequently, in this article we evaluate under which conditions the application of Transfer Learning (TL) to the DRL domain improves the learning of a new task. Our results indicate that TL can greatly accelerate DRL when transferring knowledge from similar tasks, and that the similarity between tasks plays a key role in the success or failure of knowledge transfer.