Review - Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

The paper "Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning" introduces a technique called SGI that decouples representation learning from reinforcement learning, making RL more data efficient. This is achieved by pretraining the encoder of the RL agent in an unsupervised manner using observed trajectories and two prediction tasks: predicting the next state based on the current state and action, and predicting the action responsible for state transitions. The paper demonstrates that this approach enables the RL agent to achieve greater performance under limited training data and utilize bigger encoders effectively. This work contributes to building more generalized AI agents by leveraging prior knowledge to solve new tasks.