DeepAI AI Chat

Provable Benefits of Representational Transfer in Reinforcement Learning

05/29/2022

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by Alekh Agarwal, et al.

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We study the problem of representational transfer in RL, where an agent first pretrains in a number of source tasks to discover a shared representation, which is subsequently used to learn a good policy in a target task. We propose a new notion of task relatedness between source and target tasks, and develop a novel approach for representational transfer under this assumption. Concretely, we show that given generative access to source tasks, we can discover a representation, using which subsequent linear RL techniques quickly converge to a near-optimal policy, with only online access to the target task. The sample complexity is close to knowing the ground truth features in the target task, and comparable to prior representation learning results in the source tasks. We complement our positive results with lower bounds without generative access, and validate our findings with empirical evaluation on rich observation MDPs that require deep exploration.

Alekh Agarwal
61 publications
Yuda Song
13 publications
Wen Sun
55 publications
Kaiwen Wang
10 publications
Mengdi Wang
78 publications
Xuezhou Zhang
27 publications

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