A Tractable Inference Perspective of Offline RL

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Xuejie, Liu, Anji, Broeck, Guy Van den, Liang, Yitao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912221530947584
author Liu, Xuejie
Liu, Anji
Broeck, Guy Van den
Liang, Yitao
author_facet Liu, Xuejie
Liu, Anji
Broeck, Guy Van den
Liang, Yitao
contents A popular paradigm for offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks is to first fit the offline trajectories to a sequence model, and then prompt the model for actions that lead to high expected return. In addition to obtaining accurate sequence models, this paper highlights that tractability, the ability to exactly and efficiently answer various probabilistic queries, plays an important role in offline RL. Specifically, due to the fundamental stochasticity from the offline data-collection policies and the environment dynamics, highly non-trivial conditional/constrained generation is required to elicit rewarding actions. it is still possible to approximate such queries, we observe that such crude estimates significantly undermine the benefits brought by expressive sequence models. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes Trifle (Tractable Inference for Offline RL), which leverages modern Tractable Probabilistic Models (TPMs) to bridge the gap between good sequence models and high expected returns at evaluation time. Empirically, Trifle achieves the most state-of-the-art scores in 9 Gym-MuJoCo benchmarks against strong baselines. Further, owing to its tractability, Trifle significantly outperforms prior approaches in stochastic environments and safe RL tasks (e.g. with action constraints) with minimum algorithmic modifications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_00094
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Tractable Inference Perspective of Offline RL
Liu, Xuejie
Liu, Anji
Broeck, Guy Van den
Liang, Yitao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
A popular paradigm for offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks is to first fit the offline trajectories to a sequence model, and then prompt the model for actions that lead to high expected return. In addition to obtaining accurate sequence models, this paper highlights that tractability, the ability to exactly and efficiently answer various probabilistic queries, plays an important role in offline RL. Specifically, due to the fundamental stochasticity from the offline data-collection policies and the environment dynamics, highly non-trivial conditional/constrained generation is required to elicit rewarding actions. it is still possible to approximate such queries, we observe that such crude estimates significantly undermine the benefits brought by expressive sequence models. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes Trifle (Tractable Inference for Offline RL), which leverages modern Tractable Probabilistic Models (TPMs) to bridge the gap between good sequence models and high expected returns at evaluation time. Empirically, Trifle achieves the most state-of-the-art scores in 9 Gym-MuJoCo benchmarks against strong baselines. Further, owing to its tractability, Trifle significantly outperforms prior approaches in stochastic environments and safe RL tasks (e.g. with action constraints) with minimum algorithmic modifications.
title A Tractable Inference Perspective of Offline RL
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00094