Graph Laplacian based transfer learning in reinforcement learning

Abstract

The aim of transfer learning is to accelerate learning in related domains. In reinforcement learning, many different features such as a value function and a policy can be transferred from a source domain to a related target domain. Many researches focused on transfer using hand-coded translation functions that are designed by the experts a priori. However, it is not only very costly but also problem dependent. We propose to apply the Graph Laplacian that is based on the spectral graph theory to decompose the value functions of both a source domain and a target domain into a sum of the basis functions respectively. The transfer learning can be carried out by transferring weights on the basis functions of a source domain to a target domain. We investigate two types of domain transfer, scaling and topological. The results demonstrated that the transferred policy is a better prior policy to reduce the learning time.