Benchmarks for Reinforcement Learning with Biased Offline Data and Imperfect Simulators

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Linial, Ori, Tennenholtz, Guy, Shalit, Uri
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Linial, Ori
Tennenholtz, Guy
Shalit, Uri
author_facet Linial, Ori
Tennenholtz, Guy
Shalit, Uri
contents In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications one cannot easily let the agent act in the world; this is true for autonomous vehicles, healthcare applications, and even some recommender systems, to name a few examples. Offline RL provides a way to train agents without real-world exploration, but is often faced with biases due to data distribution shifts, limited coverage, and incomplete representation of the environment. To address these issues, practical applications have tried to combine simulators with grounded offline data, using so-called hybrid methods. However, constructing a reliable simulator is in itself often challenging due to intricate system complexities as well as missing or incomplete information. In this work, we outline four principal challenges for combining offline data with imperfect simulators in RL: simulator modeling error, partial observability, state and action discrepancies, and hidden confounding. To help drive the RL community to pursue these problems, we construct ``Benchmarks for Mechanistic Offline Reinforcement Learning'' (B4MRL), which provide dataset-simulator benchmarks for the aforementioned challenges. Our results suggest the key necessity of such benchmarks for future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_00806
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarks for Reinforcement Learning with Biased Offline Data and Imperfect Simulators
Linial, Ori
Tennenholtz, Guy
Shalit, Uri
Machine Learning
In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications one cannot easily let the agent act in the world; this is true for autonomous vehicles, healthcare applications, and even some recommender systems, to name a few examples. Offline RL provides a way to train agents without real-world exploration, but is often faced with biases due to data distribution shifts, limited coverage, and incomplete representation of the environment. To address these issues, practical applications have tried to combine simulators with grounded offline data, using so-called hybrid methods. However, constructing a reliable simulator is in itself often challenging due to intricate system complexities as well as missing or incomplete information. In this work, we outline four principal challenges for combining offline data with imperfect simulators in RL: simulator modeling error, partial observability, state and action discrepancies, and hidden confounding. To help drive the RL community to pursue these problems, we construct ``Benchmarks for Mechanistic Offline Reinforcement Learning'' (B4MRL), which provide dataset-simulator benchmarks for the aforementioned challenges. Our results suggest the key necessity of such benchmarks for future research.
title Benchmarks for Reinforcement Learning with Biased Offline Data and Imperfect Simulators
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00806