Re:Frame -- Retrieving Experience From Associative Memory

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zelezetsky, Daniil, Cherepanov, Egor, Kovalev, Alexey K., Panov, Aleksandr I.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zelezetsky, Daniil
Cherepanov, Egor
Kovalev, Alexey K.
Panov, Aleksandr I.
author_facet Zelezetsky, Daniil
Cherepanov, Egor
Kovalev, Alexey K.
Panov, Aleksandr I.
contents Offline reinforcement learning (RL) often deals with suboptimal data when collecting large expert datasets is unavailable or impractical. This limitation makes it difficult for agents to generalize and achieve high performance, as they must learn primarily from imperfect or inconsistent trajectories. A central challenge is therefore how to best leverage scarce expert demonstrations alongside abundant but lower-quality data. We demonstrate that incorporating even a tiny amount of expert experience can substantially improve RL agent performance. We introduce Re:Frame (Retrieving Experience From Associative Memory), a plug-in module that augments a standard offline RL policy (e.g., Decision Transformer) with a small external Associative Memory Buffer (AMB) populated by expert trajectories drawn from a separate dataset. During training on low-quality data, the policy learns to retrieve expert data from the Associative Memory Buffer (AMB) via content-based associations and integrate them into decision-making; the same AMB is queried at evaluation. This requires no environment interaction and no modifications to the backbone architecture. On D4RL MuJoCo tasks, using as few as 60 expert trajectories (0.1% of a 6000-trajectory dataset), Re:Frame consistently improves over a strong Decision Transformer baseline in three of four settings, with gains up to +10.7 normalized points. These results show that Re:Frame offers a simple and data-efficient way to inject scarce expert knowledge and substantially improve offline RL from low-quality datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19344
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Re:Frame -- Retrieving Experience From Associative Memory
Zelezetsky, Daniil
Cherepanov, Egor
Kovalev, Alexey K.
Panov, Aleksandr I.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) often deals with suboptimal data when collecting large expert datasets is unavailable or impractical. This limitation makes it difficult for agents to generalize and achieve high performance, as they must learn primarily from imperfect or inconsistent trajectories. A central challenge is therefore how to best leverage scarce expert demonstrations alongside abundant but lower-quality data. We demonstrate that incorporating even a tiny amount of expert experience can substantially improve RL agent performance. We introduce Re:Frame (Retrieving Experience From Associative Memory), a plug-in module that augments a standard offline RL policy (e.g., Decision Transformer) with a small external Associative Memory Buffer (AMB) populated by expert trajectories drawn from a separate dataset. During training on low-quality data, the policy learns to retrieve expert data from the Associative Memory Buffer (AMB) via content-based associations and integrate them into decision-making; the same AMB is queried at evaluation. This requires no environment interaction and no modifications to the backbone architecture. On D4RL MuJoCo tasks, using as few as 60 expert trajectories (0.1% of a 6000-trajectory dataset), Re:Frame consistently improves over a strong Decision Transformer baseline in three of four settings, with gains up to +10.7 normalized points. These results show that Re:Frame offers a simple and data-efficient way to inject scarce expert knowledge and substantially improve offline RL from low-quality datasets.
title Re:Frame -- Retrieving Experience From Associative Memory
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19344