Domain adaptation in reinforcement learning: a comprehensive and systematic study

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown significant potential for dealing with complex decision-making problems. However, its performance relies heavily on the availability of a large amount of high-quality data. In many real-world situations, data distribution in the target domain may differ significantly from that in the source domain, leading to a significant drop in the performance of RL algorithms. Domain adaptation (DA) strategies have been proposed to address this issue by transferring knowledge from a source domain to a target domain. However, there have been no comprehensive and in-depth studies to evaluate these approaches. In this paper we present a comprehensive and systematic study of DA in RL. We first introduce the basic concepts and formulations of DA in RL and then review the existing DA methods used in RL. Our main objective is to fill the existing literature gap regarding DA in RL. To achieve this, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of state-of-the-art DA approaches. We aim to provide comprehensive insights into DA in RL and contribute to advancing knowledge in this field. The existing DA approaches are divided into seven categories based on application domains. The approaches in each category are discussed based on the important data adaptation metrics, and then their key characteristics are described. Finally, challenging issues and future research trends are highlighted to assist researchers in developing innovative improvements.