Knowledge Sharing and Transfer via Centralized Reward Agent for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Reward shaping is effective in addressing the sparse-reward challenge in reinforcement learning by providing immediate feedback through auxiliary informative rewards. Based on the reward shaping strategy, we propose a novel multi-task reinforcement learning framework, that integrates a centralized reward agent (CRA) and multiple distributed policy agents. The CRA functions as a knowledge pool, which aims to distill knowledge from various tasks and distribute it to individual policy agents to improve learning efficiency. Specifically, the shaped rewards serve as a straightforward metric to encode knowledge. This framework not only enhances knowledge sharing across established tasks but also adapts to new tasks by transferring valuable reward signals. We validate the proposed method on both discrete and continuous domains, demonstrating its robustness in multi-task sparse-reward settings and its effective transferability to unseen tasks.