Transfer Learning Across Policy Regimes in Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Policy models often assume that the relationship between a policy instrument and its outcome remains stable across institutional conditions. In adaptive socio-technical systems this assumption may fail: regulatory change can alter incentives, agents can respond strategically, and the mapping from policy variables to aggregate outcomes can change. This paper studies such regime change as a transfer-learning problem in adaptive multi-agent systems. A policy regime is represented as a learning problem induced by an observable input distribution and a target function mapping policy variables to outcomes. We compare a blank-slate learner that searches a flexible hypothesis class in the new regime with a transfer learner whose effective hypothesis class is restricted by structural knowledge from the previous regime. Transfer is beneficial when this restriction preserves the new target function while reducing effective complexity; it is harmful when the restriction excludes the new target and creates misspecification. A stylized emissions-regulation experimental environment and a dynamic ABM robustness experiment support the claim. When the target regime preserves an affine monotone tax-emissions relation, transfer improves empirical small-sample performance. When the target regime introduces a threshold break, the same transferred structure produces negative transfer: held-out error remains high, online prediction generates more mistakes, and repeated online streams show larger cumulative and final-window error under misspecification. The contribution is methodological: previous regulatory experience should be reused when it captures stable structural invariants, but treated cautiously when policy change alters the policy-outcome relationship.