An advantage based policy transfer algorithm for reinforcement learning
  with metrics of transferability
Md Ferdous Alam Parinaz Naghizadeh David Hoelzle
Reinforcement learning (RL) can enable sequential decision-making in complex
and high-dimensional environments if the acquisition of a new state-action pair
is efficient, i.e., when interaction with the environment is inexpensive.
However, there are a myriad of real-world applications in which a high number
of interactions are infeasible. In these environments, transfer RL algorithms,
which can be used for the transfer of knowledge from one or multiple source
environments to a target environment, have been shown to increase learning
speed and improve initial and asymptotic performance. However, most existing
transfer RL algorithms are on-policy and sample inefficient, and often require
heuristic choices in algorithm design. This paper proposes an off-policy
Advantage-based Policy Transfer algorithm, APT-RL, for fixed domain
environments. Its novelty is in using the popular notion of ``advantage'' as a
regularizer, to weigh the knowledge that should be transferred from the source,
relative to new knowledge learned in the target, removing the need for
heuristic choices. Further, we propose a new transfer performance metric to
evaluate the performance of our algorithm and unify existing transfer RL
frameworks. Finally, we present a scalable, theoretically-backed task
similarity measurement algorithm to illustrate the alignments between our
proposed transferability metric and similarities between source and target
environments. Numerical experiments on three continuous control benchmark tasks
demonstrate that APT-RL outperforms existing transfer RL algorithms on most
tasks, and is $10\%$ to $75\%$ more sample efficient than learning from
scratch.