Lifetime policy reuse and the importance of task capacity
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Abstract (arXiv)
A long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence is lifelong reinforcement learning, where learners are given many tasks in sequence and must transfer knowledge between tasks while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Policy reuse and other multi-policy reinforcement learning techniques can learn multiple tasks but may generate many policies. This paper presents two novel contributions, namely 1) Lifetime Policy Reuse, a model-agnostic policy reuse algorithm that avoids generating many policies by optimising a fixed number of near-optimal policies through a combination of policy optimisation and adaptive policy selection; and 2) the task capacity, a measure for the maximal number of tasks that a policy can accurately solve. Comparing two state-of-the-art base-learners, the results demonstrate the importance of Lifetime Policy Reuse and task capacity based pre-selection on an 18-task partially observable Pacman domain and a Cartpole domain of up to 125 tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 37 of its 85 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2021.
Builds on
37 of 85 references.
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25 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 0; 2026: 1.
4 papers.
- 2022From Intelligent Agents to Trustworthy Human-Centred Multiagent Systemscited by 4
- 2023Agent based modelling for continuously varying supply chainscited by 0
- 2024CHIRPs: Change-Induced Regret Proxy metrics for Lifelong Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2026The Parts Are Greater Than the Sum: Automated Task Sequencing for Efficient Training of Multi-Policy LLMscited by 0
- 2026The Parts Are Greater Than the Sum: Automated Task Sequencing for Efficient Training of Multi-Policy LLMs31 Jul 2026
- 2024CHIRPs: Change-Induced Regret Proxy metrics for Lifelong Reinforcement Learning5 Sep 2024
- 2023Agent based modelling for continuously varying supply chains24 Dec 2023
- 2022From Intelligent Agents to Trustworthy Human-Centred Multiagent Systems5 Oct 2022