English

Reflect-then-Plan: Offline Model-Based Planning through a Doubly Bayesian Lens

Artificial Intelligence 2025-06-09 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial when online exploration is costly or unsafe but often struggles with high epistemic uncertainty due to limited data. Existing methods rely on fixed conservative policies, restricting adaptivity and generalization. To address this, we propose Reflect-then-Plan (RefPlan), a novel doubly Bayesian offline model-based (MB) planning approach. RefPlan unifies uncertainty modeling and MB planning by recasting planning as Bayesian posterior estimation. At deployment, it updates a belief over environment dynamics using real-time observations, incorporating uncertainty into MB planning via marginalization. Empirical results on standard benchmarks show that RefPlan significantly improves the performance of conservative offline RL policies. In particular, RefPlan maintains robust performance under high epistemic uncertainty and limited data, while demonstrating resilience to changing environment dynamics, improving the flexibility, generalizability, and robustness of offline-learned policies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.06261,
  title  = {Reflect-then-Plan: Offline Model-Based Planning through a Doubly Bayesian Lens},
  author = {Jihwan Jeong and Xiaoyu Wang and Jingmin Wang and Scott Sanner and Pascal Poupart},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.06261},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:03:55.223Z