MTRL-CG: Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning Method with Spectral Clustering-Based Task Grouping

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to enhance agent performance across multiple tasks by enabling effective knowledge transfer. However, these methods adopt a fully shared policy across all tasks without explicitly distinguishing between related and conflicting ones, making them suffer from negative interference issue, where updates beneficial to one task adversely affect others and lead to degraded overall performance. In this paper, we propose a multi-task reinforcement learning method with spectral clustering-based task grouping (MTRL-CG), which leverages spectral clustering to group related tasks and separate conflicting ones, enabling group-wise policy learning to mitigate negative interference. We first quantify inter-task affinity by measuring the influence of task-specific updates on others within a shared model, and construct an affinity matrix to capture these relationships. Spectral clustering is then applied to partition tasks via spectral embedding and k-means clustering. Each task group is trained with a dedicated policy network to promote focused learning. Built upon the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, MTRL-CG can be readily integrated into existing SAC-based multi-task RL methods. Extensive experiments on the Meta-World benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MTRL-CG method.

Authors

• Wenjia Meng Shandong University
• Teng Zhang Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing Key Laboratory of Mobile Computing and Pervasive Device
• Haoliang Sun Shandong University
• Yilong Yin School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan 250101, China

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