English

DOMAIN: MilDly COnservative Model-BAsed OfflINe Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2025-06-10 v4 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL), which learns an environment model from the offline dataset and generates more out-of-distribution model data, has become an effective approach to the problem of distribution shift in offline RL. Due to the gap between the learned and actual environment, conservatism should be incorporated into the algorithm to balance accurate offline data and imprecise model data. The conservatism of current algorithms mostly relies on model uncertainty estimation. However, uncertainty estimation is unreliable and leads to poor performance in certain scenarios, and the previous methods ignore differences between the model data, which brings great conservatism. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a milDly cOnservative Model-bAsed offlINe RL algorithm (DOMAIN) without estimating model uncertainty, and designs the adaptive sampling distribution of model samples, which can adaptively adjust the model data penalty. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate that the Q value learned by the DOMAIN outside the region is a lower bound of the true Q value, the DOMAIN is less conservative than previous model-based offline RL algorithms, and has the guarantee of safety policy improvement. The results of extensive experiments show that DOMAIN outperforms prior RL algorithms and the average performance has improved by 1.8% on the D4RL benchmark.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.08925,
  title  = {DOMAIN: MilDly COnservative Model-BAsed OfflINe Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Xiao-Yin Liu and Xiao-Hu Zhou and Mei-Jiang Gui and Guo-Tao Li and Xiao-Liang Xie and Shi-Qi Liu and Shuang-Yi Wang and Qi-Chao Zhang and Biao Luo and Zeng-Guang Hou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.08925},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:23:27.154Z