Adaptive Neighborhood-Constrained Q Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Mao, Yixiu, Qu, Yun, Wang, Qi, Ji, Xiangyang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Mao, Yixiu
Qu, Yun
Wang, Qi
Ji, Xiangyang
author_facet Mao, Yixiu
Qu, Yun
Wang, Qi
Ji, Xiangyang
contents Offline reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from extrapolation errors induced by out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, offline RL algorithms typically impose constraints on action selection, which can be systematically categorized into density, support, and sample constraints. However, we show that each category has inherent limitations: density and sample constraints tend to be overly conservative in many scenarios, while the support constraint, though least restrictive, faces challenges in accurately modeling the behavior policy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new neighborhood constraint that restricts action selection in the Bellman target to the union of neighborhoods of dataset actions. Theoretically, the constraint not only bounds extrapolation errors and distribution shift under certain conditions, but also approximates the support constraint without requiring behavior policy modeling. Moreover, it retains substantial flexibility and enables pointwise conservatism by adapting the neighborhood radius for each data point. In practice, we employ data quality as the adaptation criterion and design an adaptive neighborhood constraint. Building on an efficient bilevel optimization framework, we develop a simple yet effective algorithm, Adaptive Neighborhood-constrained Q learning (ANQ), to perform Q learning with target actions satisfying this constraint. Empirically, ANQ achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard offline RL benchmarks and exhibits strong robustness in scenarios with noisy or limited data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_02567
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive Neighborhood-Constrained Q Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Mao, Yixiu
Qu, Yun
Wang, Qi
Ji, Xiangyang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from extrapolation errors induced by out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, offline RL algorithms typically impose constraints on action selection, which can be systematically categorized into density, support, and sample constraints. However, we show that each category has inherent limitations: density and sample constraints tend to be overly conservative in many scenarios, while the support constraint, though least restrictive, faces challenges in accurately modeling the behavior policy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new neighborhood constraint that restricts action selection in the Bellman target to the union of neighborhoods of dataset actions. Theoretically, the constraint not only bounds extrapolation errors and distribution shift under certain conditions, but also approximates the support constraint without requiring behavior policy modeling. Moreover, it retains substantial flexibility and enables pointwise conservatism by adapting the neighborhood radius for each data point. In practice, we employ data quality as the adaptation criterion and design an adaptive neighborhood constraint. Building on an efficient bilevel optimization framework, we develop a simple yet effective algorithm, Adaptive Neighborhood-constrained Q learning (ANQ), to perform Q learning with target actions satisfying this constraint. Empirically, ANQ achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard offline RL benchmarks and exhibits strong robustness in scenarios with noisy or limited data.
title Adaptive Neighborhood-Constrained Q Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02567