An Introduction to Intertask Transfer for Reinforcement Learning

Transfer learning has recently gained popularity due to the development of algorithms that can successfully generalize information across multiple tasks. This article focuses on transfer in the context of reinforcement learning domains, a general learning framework where an agent acts in an environment to maximize a reward signal. The goals of this article are to (1) familiarize readers with the transfer learning problem in reinforcement learning domains, (2) explain why the problem is both interesting and difficult, (3) present a selection of existing techniques that demonstrate different solutions, and (4) provide representative open problems in the hope of encouraging additional research in this exciting area.