Inferring Behavior-Specific Context Improves Zero-Shot Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
<|reference_start|>Inferring Behavior-Specific Context Improves Zero-Shot Generalization in Reinforcement Learning: In this work, we address the challenge of zero-shot generalization (ZSG) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents must adapt to entirely novel environments without additional training. We argue that understanding and utilizing contextual cues, such as the gravity level of the environment, is critical for robust generalization, and we propose to integrate the learning of context representations directly with policy learning. Our algorithm demonstrates improved generalization on various simulated domains, outperforming prior context-learning techniques in zero-shot settings. By jointly learning policy and context, our method acquires behavior-specific context representations, enabling adaptation to unseen environments and marks progress towards reinforcement learning systems that generalize across diverse real-world tasks. Our code and experiments are available at https://github.com/tidiane-camaret/contextual_rl_zero_shot.<|reference_end|>
@article{ndir2024inferring,
    title={Inferring Behavior-Specific Context Improves Zero-Shot Generalization in
  Reinforcement Learning},
    author={Tidiane Camaret Ndir, Andr'e Biedenkapp, Noor Awad},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.09521},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.09521},
    primaryClass={cs.LG cs.AI}
}