Transfer Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

This paper surveys the field of transfer learning in the problem setting of Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL has been a key solution to sequential decision-making problems. Along with the fast advances of RL in various domains, such as robotics and game-playing, transfer learning arises as an important technique to assist RL by leveraging and transferring external expertise to boost the learning process of RL. In this survey, we review the central issues of transfer learning in the RL domain, providing a systematic categorization of its state-of-the-art techniques. We analyze their goals, methodologies, applications, and the RL frameworks under which the transfer learning techniques are approachable. We discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other relevant topics from the RL perspective and also explore the potential challenges as well as future development directions for transfer learning in RL.