Transfer Learning for Related Reinforcement Learning Tasks via Image-to-Image Translation

Deep Reinforcement Learning has managed to achieve state-of-the-art results in learning control policies directly from raw pixels. However, despite its remarkable success, it fails to generalize, a fundamental component required in a stable Artificial Intelligence system. Using the Atari game Breakout, we demonstrate the difficulty of a trained agent in adjusting to simple modifications in the raw image, ones that a human could adapt to trivially. In transfer learning, the goal is to use the knowledge gained from the source task to make the training of the target task faster and better. We show that using various forms of fine-tuning, a common method for transfer learning, is not effective for adapting to such small visual changes. In fact, it is often easier to re-train the agent from scratch than to fine-tune a trained agent. We suggest that in some cases transfer learning can be improved by adding a dedicated component whose goal is to learn to visually map between the known domain and the new one. Concretely, we use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create a mapping function to translate images in the target task to corresponding images in the source task, allowing us to transform between the different tasks. We show that learning this mapping is substantially more efficient than re-training. A visualization of a trained agent playing in a modified condition, with and without the GAN transfer, can be seen in https://youtu.be/e2TwjduPT8g .