title: Understanding the Generalization Gap in Visual Reinforcement Learning
abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have achieved superhuman performance on several video game suites. However, unlike humans, the trained policies fail to transfer between related games or even between different levels of the same game. Recent works have attempted to reduce this generalization gap using ideas such as data augmentation and learning domain invariant features. However, the transfer performance still remains unsatisfactory. In this work, we use procedurally generated video games to empirically investigate several hypotheses to explain the lack of transfer. We also show that simple auxiliary tasks can improve the generalization of policies. Contrary to the belief that policy adaptation to new levels requires full policy finetuning, we find that visual features transfer across levels, and only the parameters, that use these visual features to predict actions, require finetuning. Finally, to inform fruitful avenues for future research, we construct simple oracle methods that close the generalization gap. 
authors: Anurag Ajay Ge Yang Ofir Nachum Pulkit Agrawal
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