Transfer Value Iteration Networks
This addresses a domain-specific limitation in reinforcement learning for tasks with similar but not identical environments, offering an incremental improvement over VINs.
The paper tackles the problem of poor generalization of Value Iteration Networks (VINs) to domains with non-identical action and feature spaces by proposing Transfer VINs (TVINs), which enable transfer learning with limited target data and empirically outperform VINs in such scenarios.
Value iteration networks (VINs) have been demonstrated to have a good generalization ability for reinforcement learning tasks across similar domains. However, based on our experiments, a policy learned by VINs still fail to generalize well on the domain whose action space and feature space are not identical to those in the domain where it is trained. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning approach on top of VINs, termed Transfer VINs (TVINs), such that a learned policy from a source domain can be generalized to a target domain with only limited training data, even if the source domain and the target domain have domain-specific actions and features. We empirically verify that our proposed TVINs outperform VINs when the source and the target domains have similar but not identical action and feature spaces. Furthermore, we show that the performance improvement is consistent across different environments, maze sizes, dataset sizes as well as different values of hyperparameters such as number of iteration and kernel size.