Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning: Reusing Prior Computation to Accelerate Progress

Learning tabula rasa, that is without any prior knowledge, is the prevalent workflow in reinforcement learning (RL) research. However, RL systems, when applied to large-scale settings, rarely operate tabula rasa. Such large-scale systems undergo multiple design or algorithmic changes during their development cycle and use ad hoc approaches for incorporating these changes without re-training from scratch, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the inefficiency of deep RL typically excludes researchers without access to industrial-scale resources from tackling computationally-demanding problems. To address these issues, we present reincarnating RL as an alternative workflow or class of problem settings, where prior computational work (e.g., learned policies) is reused or transferred between design iterations of an RL agent, or from one RL agent to another.