English

Federated Ensemble-Directed Offline Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2024-10-07 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We consider the problem of federated offline reinforcement learning (RL), a scenario under which distributed learning agents must collaboratively learn a high-quality control policy only using small pre-collected datasets generated according to different unknown behavior policies. Na\"{i}vely combining a standard offline RL approach with a standard federated learning approach to solve this problem can lead to poorly performing policies. In response, we develop the Federated Ensemble-Directed Offline Reinforcement Learning Algorithm (FEDORA), which distills the collective wisdom of the clients using an ensemble learning approach. We develop the FEDORA codebase to utilize distributed compute resources on a federated learning platform. We show that FEDORA significantly outperforms other approaches, including offline RL over the combined data pool, in various complex continuous control environments and real-world datasets. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of FEDORA in the real-world on a mobile robot. We provide our code and a video of our experiments at \url{https://github.com/DesikRengarajan/FEDORA}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.03097,
  title  = {Federated Ensemble-Directed Offline Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Desik Rengarajan and Nitin Ragothaman and Dileep Kalathil and Srinivas Shakkottai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.03097},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted at NeurIPS 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:26:04.120Z