Transfer Learning via Temporal Contrastive Learning

April 2024

Transfer Learning via Temporal Contrastive Learning

Authors:

Weihao Zeng

Abstract:

This thesis introduces a novel transfer learning framework for deep reinforcement learning. The approach automatically combines goalconditioned policies with temporal contrastive learning to discover meaningful sub-goals. The approach involves pre-training a goal-conditioned agent, finetuning it on the target domain, and using contrastive learning to construct a planning graph that guides the agent via sub-goals. Experiments on PointMaze and multi-agent coordination Overcooked tasks demonstrate improved sample efficiency, the ability to solve sparse-reward and long-horizon problems, and enhanced interpretability compared to baselines. The results highlight the effectiveness of integrating goalconditioned policies with unsupervised temporal abstraction learning for complex multi-agent transfer learning. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our method achieves the same or better performances while requiring only 23.4% of the training samples.
@mastersthesis{Zeng-2024-140512,
author = {Weihao Zeng},
title = {Transfer Learning via Temporal Contrastive Learning},
year = {2024},
month = {April},
school = {Carnegie Mellon University},
address = {Pittsburgh, PA},
number = {CMU-RI-TR-24-10},
}
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