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A Behavior Regularized Implicit Policy for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2022-10-11 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Offline reinforcement learning enables learning from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. The lack of environmental interactions makes the policy training vulnerable to state-action pairs far from the training dataset and prone to missing rewarding actions. For training more effective agents, we propose a framework that supports learning a flexible yet well-regularized fully-implicit policy. We further propose a simple modification to the classical policy-matching methods for regularizing with respect to the dual form of the Jensen--Shannon divergence and the integral probability metrics. We theoretically show the correctness of the policy-matching approach, and the correctness and a good finite-sample property of our modification. An effective instantiation of our framework through the GAN structure is provided, together with techniques to explicitly smooth the state-action mapping for robust generalization beyond the static dataset. Extensive experiments and ablation study on the D4RL benchmark validate our framework and the effectiveness of our algorithmic designs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.09673,
  title  = {A Behavior Regularized Implicit Policy for Offline Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Shentao Yang and Zhendong Wang and Huangjie Zheng and Yihao Feng and Mingyuan Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.09673},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

33 pages, 3 figures, and 8 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:46:02.835Z