Learning When to Transfer: Reinforcement Learning for Carbon-Footprint Modeling in New Manufacturing Domains

Manufacturers often need to characterize a new material, process, or product before enough operating data are available to train reliable predictive models for this new, target domain. Existing manufacturing operations contain potentially useful knowledge to accelerate this characterization, but indiscriminate reuse of data from existing source domains can cause negative transfer in learning of the new, target domain when the manufacturing domains differ sufficiently. This work proposes a reinforcement-learning method for selective knowledge transfer, where its reward scores each opportunity to transfer against supervised alternatives, so negative transfer is avoided and controlled during forward prediction instead of being diagnosed afterwards. Given limited data from a new target domain, the learned policy chooses among predictors based on individual source operations, subsets of the sources, or the supervised alternatives: fully pooled sources, or target data alone. A validation gate deploys the transferred prediction only when it improves upon the supervised alternatives. The method is designed for learning variables supporting carbon accounting, as well as performance and quality outcomes. We demonstrate the approach by quantifying the embodied greenhouse-gas emissions of parts produced via material-extrusion additive manufacturing, using data from 729 experiments spanning five materials: ABS, PETG, TPU, PLA, and recycled PLA. The response combines measured fabrication electricity with polymer-specific cradle-to-gate production factors, while 22 material, process, and toolpath features characterize each experiment. In leave-one-material-out evaluation, this method achieves a mean test RMSE of 5.2 g CO2e per part, 20.00% lower than target-only training (32.5% lower when only 5-10% of the target training data are available) and 10.30% lower than indiscriminate source-target pooling.