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Main Authors: Wang, Mianchu, Jin, Yue, Montana, Giovanni
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09367
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author Wang, Mianchu
Jin, Yue
Montana, Giovanni
author_facet Wang, Mianchu
Jin, Yue
Montana, Giovanni
contents Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to infer sequential decision policies using only offline datasets. This is a particularly difficult setup, especially when learning to achieve multiple different goals or outcomes under a given scenario with only sparse rewards. For offline learning of goal-conditioned policies via supervised learning, previous work has shown that an advantage weighted log-likelihood loss guarantees monotonic policy improvement. In this work we argue that, despite its benefits, this approach is still insufficient to fully address the distribution shift and multi-modality problems. The latter is particularly severe in long-horizon tasks where finding a unique and optimal policy that goes from a state to the desired goal is challenging as there may be multiple and potentially conflicting solutions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a complementary advantage-based weighting scheme that introduces an additional source of inductive bias: given a value-based partitioning of the state space, the contribution of actions expected to lead to target regions that are easier to reach, compared to the final goal, is further increased. Empirically, we demonstrate that the proposed approach, Dual-Advantage Weighted Offline Goal-conditioned RL (DAWOG), outperforms several competing offline algorithms in commonly used benchmarks. Analytically, we offer a guarantee that the learnt policy is never worse than the underlying behaviour policy.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_09367
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publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Goal-conditioned Offline Reinforcement Learning through State Space Partitioning
Wang, Mianchu
Jin, Yue
Montana, Giovanni
Machine Learning
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to infer sequential decision policies using only offline datasets. This is a particularly difficult setup, especially when learning to achieve multiple different goals or outcomes under a given scenario with only sparse rewards. For offline learning of goal-conditioned policies via supervised learning, previous work has shown that an advantage weighted log-likelihood loss guarantees monotonic policy improvement. In this work we argue that, despite its benefits, this approach is still insufficient to fully address the distribution shift and multi-modality problems. The latter is particularly severe in long-horizon tasks where finding a unique and optimal policy that goes from a state to the desired goal is challenging as there may be multiple and potentially conflicting solutions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a complementary advantage-based weighting scheme that introduces an additional source of inductive bias: given a value-based partitioning of the state space, the contribution of actions expected to lead to target regions that are easier to reach, compared to the final goal, is further increased. Empirically, we demonstrate that the proposed approach, Dual-Advantage Weighted Offline Goal-conditioned RL (DAWOG), outperforms several competing offline algorithms in commonly used benchmarks. Analytically, we offer a guarantee that the learnt policy is never worse than the underlying behaviour policy.
title Goal-conditioned Offline Reinforcement Learning through State Space Partitioning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09367