Learning When to Transfer: Reinforcement Learning for Carbon-Footprint Modeling in New Manufacturing Domains

Muhammad Umar Farooq, Daniel R. Cooper

Manufacturers often need to characterize a new material, process, or product before enough operating data are available to train reliable predictive models for this new, target domain. Existing manufacturing operations contain potentially useful knowledge to accelerate this characterization, but indiscriminate reuse of data from existing source domains can cause negative transfer in learning of the new, target domain when the manufacturing domains differ sufficiently. This work proposes a reinforcement-learning method for selective knowledge transfer, where its reward scores each opportunity to transfer against supervised alternatives, so negative transfer is avoided and controlled during forward prediction instead of being diagnosed afterwards. Given limited data from a new target domain, the learned policy chooses among predictors based on individual source operations, subsets of the sources, or the supervised alternatives: fully pooled sources, or target data alone. A validation gate deploys the transferred prediction only when it improves upon the supervised alternatives. The method is designed for learning variables supporting carbon accounting, as well as performance and…