Abstract
As with any machine learning problem with limited data, effective offline RL algorithms require careful regularization to avoid overfitting. One class of methods, known as one-step RL, perform just one step of policy improvement. These methods, which include advantage-weighted regression and conditional behavioral cloning, are thus simple and stable, but can have limited asymptotic performance. A second class of methods, known as critic regularization, perform many steps of policy improvement with a regularized objective. These methods typically require more compute but have appealing lower-bound guarantees. In this paper, we draw a connection between these methods: applying a multi-step critic regularization method with a regularization coefficient of 1 yields the same policy as one-step RL. While our theoretical results require assumptions (e.g., deterministic dynamics), our experiments nevertheless show that our analysis makes accurate, testable predictions about practical offline RL methods (CQL and one-step RL) with commonly-used hyperparameters.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 9485-9507 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Proceedings of Machine Learning Research |
Volume | 202 |
State | Published - 2023 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2023 - Honolulu, United States Duration: Jul 23 2023 → Jul 29 2023 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Artificial Intelligence
- Software
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Statistics and Probability