Generalizing Curricula for Reinforcement Learning

Sanmit Narvekar, Peter Stone

Student First Author: Yes

Keywords: Curriculum Learning, Transfer Learning, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Curriculum learning for reinforcement learning (RL) is an active area of research that seeks to speed up training of RL agents on a target task by first training them through a series of progressively more challenging source tasks. Each task in this sequence builds upon skills learned in previous tasks to gradually develop the repertoire needed to solve the final task. Over the past few years, many automated methods to develop curricula have been developed. However, they all have one key limitation: the curriculum must be regenerated from scratch for each new agent or task encountered. In many cases, this generation process can be very expensive. However, there is structure that can be exploited between tasks and agents, such that knowledge gained developing a curriculum for one task can be reused to speed up creating a curriculum for a new task. In this paper, we present a method to generalize a curriculum learned for one set of tasks to a novel set of unseen tasks.

TL;DR: We present a method to generalize a curriculum learned for one set of tasks to a novel set of unseen tasks.