Analysis of Meta-Reinforcement Learning on Transfer Learning for HVAC Control
34th Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference, SIU 2026, İstanbul, Türkiye, 7 - 10 Temmuz 2026, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
- Doi Numarası: 10.1109/siu71813.2026.11636860
- Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Climate Generalization, DDQN, HVAC Control, MAML-DDQN, Meta-Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning
- Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) control across climatically diverse buildings is challenging, as policies trained in one climate often fail to generalize to others. We investigate transfer and meta-reinforcement learning for building climate control using Sinergym with a custom EnergyPlus model of a real room, comparing Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) and Model-Agnostic Meta Learning DDQN (MAML-DDQN) across three transfer scenarios on a target very hot climate. Fine-tuned DDQN reduces temperature violations by a factor of 35 over the from-scratch baseline and improves reward by 86% over zero-shot transfer, while MAML-DDQN converges in less than half the fine-tuning episodes and exhibits substantially lower variance across seeds. Results highlight a key trade-off: MAML-DDQN is preferable at adaptation-focused deployments, while fine-tuned DDQN is superior when maximum performance is the objective.