Sharing Experience in Multitask Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

In multitask reinforcement learning, tasks often have sub-tasks that share the same solution, even though the overall tasks are different. If the shared-portions could be effectively identified, then the learning process could be improved since all the samples between tasks in the shared space could be used. In this paper, we propose a Sharing Experience Framework (SEF) for simultaneously training of multiple tasks. In SEF, a confidence sharing agent uses task-specific rewards from the environment to identify similar parts that should be shared across tasks and defines those parts as shared-regions between tasks. The shared-regions are expected to guide task-policies sharing their experience during the learning process. The experiments highlight that our framework improves the performance and the stability of learning task-policies, and is possible to help task-policies avoid local optimums.