# Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning through Transfer and Architectural Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.02268 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02268/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Transfer Learning and Curriculum Learning in Sokoban](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11702/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work in deep reinforcement learning has allowed algorithms to learn complex tasks such as Atari 2600 games just from the reward provided by the game, but these algorithms presently require millions of training steps in order to learn, making them approximately five orders of magnitude slower than humans. One reason for this is that humans build robust shared representations that are applicable to collections of problems, making it much easier to assimilate new variants. This paper first introduces the idea of automatically-generated game sets to aid in transfer learning research, and then demonstrates the utility of shared representations by showing that models can substantially benefit from the incorporation of relevant architectural priors. This technique affords a remarkable 50x positive transfer on a toy problem-set.