SOReL and TOReL: Two Methods for Fully Offline Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fellows, Mattie, Wibault, Clarisse, Berdica, Uljad, Forkel, Johannes, Osborne, Michael A., Foerster, Jakob N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fellows, Mattie
Wibault, Clarisse
Berdica, Uljad
Forkel, Johannes
Osborne, Michael A.
Foerster, Jakob N.
author_facet Fellows, Mattie
Wibault, Clarisse
Berdica, Uljad
Forkel, Johannes
Osborne, Michael A.
Foerster, Jakob N.
contents Sample efficiency remains a major obstacle for real world adoption of reinforcement learning (RL): success has been limited to settings where simulators provide access to essentially unlimited environment interactions, which in reality are typically costly or dangerous to obtain. Offline RL in principle offers a solution by exploiting offline data to learn a near-optimal policy before deployment. In practice, however, current offline RL methods rely on extensive online interactions for hyperparameter tuning, and have no reliable bound on their initial online performance. To address these two issues, we introduce two algorithms. Firstly, SOReL: an algorithm for safe offline reinforcement learning. Using only offline data, our Bayesian approach infers a posterior over environment dynamics to obtain a reliable estimate of the online performance via the posterior predictive uncertainty. Crucially, all hyperparameters are also tuned fully offline. Secondly, we introduce TOReL: a tuning for offline reinforcement learning algorithm that extends our information rate based offline hyperparameter tuning methods to general offline RL approaches. Our empirical evaluation confirms SOReL's ability to accurately estimate regret in the Bayesian setting whilst TOReL's offline hyperparameter tuning achieves competitive performance with the best online hyperparameter tuning methods using only offline data. Thus, SOReL and TOReL make a significant step towards safe and reliable offline RL, unlocking the potential for RL in the real world. Our implementations are publicly available: https://github.com/CWibault/sorel\_torel.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22442
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SOReL and TOReL: Two Methods for Fully Offline Reinforcement Learning
Fellows, Mattie
Wibault, Clarisse
Berdica, Uljad
Forkel, Johannes
Osborne, Michael A.
Foerster, Jakob N.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Sample efficiency remains a major obstacle for real world adoption of reinforcement learning (RL): success has been limited to settings where simulators provide access to essentially unlimited environment interactions, which in reality are typically costly or dangerous to obtain. Offline RL in principle offers a solution by exploiting offline data to learn a near-optimal policy before deployment. In practice, however, current offline RL methods rely on extensive online interactions for hyperparameter tuning, and have no reliable bound on their initial online performance. To address these two issues, we introduce two algorithms. Firstly, SOReL: an algorithm for safe offline reinforcement learning. Using only offline data, our Bayesian approach infers a posterior over environment dynamics to obtain a reliable estimate of the online performance via the posterior predictive uncertainty. Crucially, all hyperparameters are also tuned fully offline. Secondly, we introduce TOReL: a tuning for offline reinforcement learning algorithm that extends our information rate based offline hyperparameter tuning methods to general offline RL approaches. Our empirical evaluation confirms SOReL's ability to accurately estimate regret in the Bayesian setting whilst TOReL's offline hyperparameter tuning achieves competitive performance with the best online hyperparameter tuning methods using only offline data. Thus, SOReL and TOReL make a significant step towards safe and reliable offline RL, unlocking the potential for RL in the real world. Our implementations are publicly available: https://github.com/CWibault/sorel\_torel.
title SOReL and TOReL: Two Methods for Fully Offline Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22442