# Invariant Feature Spaces to Transfer Skills with Reinforcement Learning

#### March, 2017

The paper that I want to briefly comment in this post is called "Learning Invariant Feature Spaces to Transfer Skills with Reinforcement Learning" and is written by Abhishek Gupta, Coline Devin, YuXuan Liu, Pieter Abbeel and Sergey Levine. [Paper]

They propose to accelerate the acquisition of new skills using prior knowledge acquired by morphologically different agents in the same task. How do they obtain this? First, multiple skills (proxy skills) are learned by both source and target agents. Second, they use these learned skills to construct a mapping from the states of both agents to an invariant feature space. And finally, they project the execution of source robot's new skill (target skill) into the invariant space, and then, track the corresponding features through the target robot's actions.

As it was mentioned before, and also sugested by the title of the paper, the transfer learning process is carried out thanks to the assumption of the existence of a common feature space between both agents. In this feature space we have $p( f (s_S)) = p(g(s_T ))$ for $s_S \sim \pi_S$ and $s_T \sim \pi_T$, where $\pi_S$ and $\pi_T$ are the state distribution of the optimal policies in the source and target robots respectively.

The generation of this feature space required to generate first a paring $P$ (the list of corresponding pairs of states in both agents). In the paper, these correspondences were obtained by time-based alignment or by Dynamic Time Warping(DTW).

The learning process of the embedding functions $f$ and $g$ from a proxy task involves the optimization of: $$\min_{\theta_f, \theta_g, \theta_{\text{Dec}_S}, \theta_{\text{Dec}_T}} \sum_{(s_{S_p}, s_{T_p}) \in P} \mathcal{L}_{AE_S}(s_{S_{p,r}};\theta_f,\theta_{\text{Dec}_S}) + \mathcal{L}_{AE_T}(s_{S_{p,r}};\theta_g,\theta_{\text{Dec}_T}) + \mathcal{L}_{\text{sim}}(s_{S_{p,r}},s_{S_{p,r}};\theta_f,\theta_g)$$