Online Transfer Learning in Reinforcement Learning Domains

This paper proposes an online transfer framework to capture the interaction among agents and shows that current transfer learning in reinforcement learning is a special case of online transfer. Furthermore, this paper re-characterizes existing agents-teaching-agents methods as online transfer and analyze one such teaching method in three ways. First, the convergence of Q-learning and Sarsa with tabular representation with a finite budget is proven. Second, the convergence of Q-learning and Sarsa with linear function approximation is established. Third, the we show the asymptotic performance cannot be hurt through teaching. Additionally, all theoretical results are empirically validated.