Continual Policy Distillation from Distributed Reinforcement Learning Teachers
Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) aims to develop lifelong learning agents to continuously acquire knowledge across diverse tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This requires efficiently managing the stability-plasticity dilemma and leveraging prior experience to rapidly generalize to novel tasks. While various enhancement strategies for both aspects have been proposed, achieving scalable performance by directly applying RL to sequential task streams remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel teacher-student framework that decouples CRL into two independent processes: training single-task teacher models through distributed RL and continually distilling them into a central generalist model. This design is motivated by the observation that RL excels at solving single tasks, while policy distillation -- a relatively stable supervised learning process -- is well aligned with large foundation models and multi-task learning. Moreover, a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture and a replay-based approach are employed to enhance the plasticity and stability of the continual policy distillation process. Extensive experiments on the Meta-World benchmark demonstrate that our framework enables efficient continual RL, recovering over 85% of teacher performance while constraining task-wise forgetting to within 10%.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningMulti-Task LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Continual Distillation of Teachers from Different Domains
Deep learning models continue to scale, with some requiring more storage than many large-scale datasets. Thus, we introduce a new paradigm: Continual Distillation (CD), where a student learns sequentially from a stream o…
Domain GeneralizationRecursive Distillation for Open-Set Distributed Robot Localization
A typical assumption in state-of-the-art self-localization models is that an annotated training dataset is available for the target workspace. However, this is not necessarily true when a robot travels around the general…
Continual LearningImage RetrievalRetrievalTransfer LearningMOPD: Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Capability Integration in LLM Post-Training
Modern large language models (LLMs) rely on reinforcement learning during post-training to push specific capabilities, yet integrating multiple capabilities into one model remains hard. Existing methods, such as Off-Poli…
Reinforcement LearningContinual Reinforcement Learning deployed in Real-life using Policy Distillation and Sim2Real Transfer
We focus on the problem of teaching a robot to solve tasks presented sequentially, i.e., in a continual learning scenario. The robot should be able to solve all tasks it has encountered, without forgetting past tasks. We…
Continual Learningreinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)+1DisCoRL: Continual Reinforcement Learning via Policy Distillation
In multi-task reinforcement learning there are two main challenges: at training time, the ability to learn different policies with a single model; at test time, inferring which of those policies applying without an exter…
reinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Representation Learning