Enhancing Robustness of Offline Reinforcement Learning Under Data Corruption via Sharpness-Aware Minimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Le, Chen, Jiayu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Le
Chen, Jiayu
author_facet Xu, Le
Chen, Jiayu
contents Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is vulnerable to real-world data corruption, with even robust algorithms failing under challenging observation and mixture corruptions. We posit this failure stems from data corruption creating sharp minima in the loss landscape, leading to poor generalization. To address this, we are the first to apply Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) as a general-purpose, plug-and-play optimizer for offline RL. SAM seeks flatter minima, guiding models to more robust parameter regions. We integrate SAM into strong baselines for data corruption: IQL, a top-performing offline RL algorithm in this setting, and RIQL, an algorithm designed specifically for data-corruption robustness. We evaluate them on D4RL benchmarks with both random and adversarial corruption. Our SAM-enhanced methods consistently and significantly outperform the original baselines. Visualizations of the reward surface confirm that SAM finds smoother solutions, providing strong evidence for its effectiveness in improving the robustness of offline RL agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17568
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Robustness of Offline Reinforcement Learning Under Data Corruption via Sharpness-Aware Minimization
Xu, Le
Chen, Jiayu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is vulnerable to real-world data corruption, with even robust algorithms failing under challenging observation and mixture corruptions. We posit this failure stems from data corruption creating sharp minima in the loss landscape, leading to poor generalization. To address this, we are the first to apply Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) as a general-purpose, plug-and-play optimizer for offline RL. SAM seeks flatter minima, guiding models to more robust parameter regions. We integrate SAM into strong baselines for data corruption: IQL, a top-performing offline RL algorithm in this setting, and RIQL, an algorithm designed specifically for data-corruption robustness. We evaluate them on D4RL benchmarks with both random and adversarial corruption. Our SAM-enhanced methods consistently and significantly outperform the original baselines. Visualizations of the reward surface confirm that SAM finds smoother solutions, providing strong evidence for its effectiveness in improving the robustness of offline RL agents.
title Enhancing Robustness of Offline Reinforcement Learning Under Data Corruption via Sharpness-Aware Minimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17568