Seek for commonalities: Shared features extraction for multi-task reinforcement learning via adversarial training

Multi-task reinforcement learning is promising to alleviate the low sample efficiency and high computation cost of reinforcement learning algorithms. However, current methods mostly focus on unique features that are not conducive to the transfer between tasks. Moreover, they usually lack a balance mechanism among tasks, which often leads to the unnecessary occupation of training resources by tasks that have already been trained. To address the problems, a simple yet effective method referred to as Adaptive Experience buffer with Shared Features Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (AESF-MTRL) is proposed. In AESF-MTRL, input observation of the environment is divided into shared features and unique features, which are extracted using different feature extractors. Unique features are extracted by simple gradient descent, while shared features are extracted using adversarial training, with an additional discriminator trained to ensure that the extracted features are indeed shared features. AESF-MTRL also maintains a reward stack to adjust the sampling ratio of trajectories from different tasks dynamically during the update period to balance the learning process of different tasks. Experiments on multiple robotics control environments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.