The objective of transfer reinforcement learning is to generalize from a set
of previous tasks to unseen new tasks. In this work, we focus on the transfer
scenario where the dynamics among tasks are the same, but their goals differ.
Although general value function (Sutton et al., 2011) has been shown to be
useful for knowledge transfer, learning a universal value function can be
challenging in practice. To attack this, we propose (1) to use universal
successor representations (USR) to represent the transferable knowledge and (2)
a USR approximator (USRA) that can be trained by interacting with the
environment. Our experiments show that USR can be effectively applied to new
tasks, and the agent initialized by the trained USRA can achieve the goal
considerably faster than random initialization.