Papers › Transfer Learning for Related Reinforcement Learning Tasks via Image-to-Image Translation

Transfer Learning for Related Reinforcement Learning Tasks via Image-to-Image Translation

31 May 2018ICLR 2019 5arXiv:1806.07377archive 2025-07-28

Shani Gamrian, Yoav Goldberg

Despite the remarkable success of Deep RL in learning control policies from raw pixels, the resulting models do not generalize. We demonstrate that a trained agent fails completely when facing small visual changes, and that fine-tuning---the common transfer learning paradigm---fails to adapt to these changes, to the extent that it is faster to re-train the model from scratch. We show that by separating the visual transfer task from the control policy we achieve substantially better sample efficiency and transfer behavior, allowing an agent trained on the source task to transfer well to the target tasks. The visual mapping from the target to the source domain is performed using unaligned GANs, resulting in a control policy that can be further improved using imitation learning from imperfect demonstrations. We demonstrate the approach on synthetic visual variants of the Breakout game, as well as on transfer between subsequent levels of Road Fighter, a Nintendo car-driving game. A visualization of our approach can be seen in https://youtu.be/4mnkzYyXMn4 and https://youtu.be/KCGTrQi6Ogo .

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

ShaniGam/RL-GAN officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
PeteXC/Transfer-Learning mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image-to-Image TranslationImitation LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Transfer LearningTranslationreinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections