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Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) have taken an iterative actor-critic approach involving off-policy evaluation. In this paper we show that simply doing one step of constrained/regularized policy improvement using an on-policy Q estimate of the behavior policy performs surprisingly well. This onestep algorithm beats the previously reported results of iterative algorithms on a large portion of the D4RL benchmark. The one-step baseline achieves this strong performance while being notably simpler and more robust to hyperparameters than previously proposed iterative algorithms. We argue that the relatively poor performance of iterative approaches is a result of the high variance inherent in doing off-policy evaluation and magnified by the repeated optimization of policies against those estimates. In addition, we hypothesize that the strong performance of the one-step algorithm is due to a combination of favorable structure in the environment and behavior policy.
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Offline Reinforcement Learning with Closed-Form Policy Improvement Operators
Behavior constrained policy optimization has been demonstrated to be a successful paradigm for tackling Offline Reinforcement Learning. By exploiting historical transitions, a policy is trained to maximize a learned value function while constrained by the behavior policy to avoid a significant distributional shift. In this paper, we propose our closed-form policy improvement operators. We make a novel observation that the behavior constraint naturally motivates the use of first-order Taylor approximation, leading to a linear approximation of the policy objective. Additionally, as practical datasets are usually collected by heterogeneous policies, we model the behavior policies as a Gaussian Mixture and overcome the induced optimization difficulties by leveraging the LogSumExp’s lower bound and Jensen’s Inequality, giving rise to a closed-form policy improvement operator. We instantiate both one-step and iterative offline RL algorithms with our novel policy improvement operators and empirically demonstrate their effectiveness over state-of-the-art algorithms on the standard D4RL benchmark. Our code is available at https://cfpi-icml23.github.io/.
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- PAR ID:
- 10466939
- Editor(s):
- Krause, Andreas and; Brunskill, Emma; Cho, Kyunghyun; Engelhardt, Barbara; Sabato, Sivan; Scarlett, Jonathan
- Publisher / Repository:
- ICML 2023
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of Machine Learning Research
- Volume:
- 202
- ISSN:
- 2640-3498
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 20485--20528
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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