Title: DEAS: DEtached value learning with Action Sequence for Scalable Offline RL
Primary area: reinforcement learning
Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Offline Reinforcement Learning, Vision Language Action Model

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents an attractive paradigm for training intelligent agents without expensive online interactions. However, current approaches still struggle with complex, long-horizon sequential decision making. In this work, we introduce DEtached value learning with Action Sequence (DEAS), a simple yet effective offline RL framework that leverages action sequences for value learning. These temporally extended actions provide richer information than single-step actions and can be interpreted through the options framework via semi-Markov decision process Q-learning, enabling reduction of the effective planning horizon by considering longer sequences at once. However, directly adopting such sequences in actor-critic algorithms introduces excessive value overestimation, which we address through detached value learning that steers value estimates toward in-distribution actions that achieve high return in the offline dataset. We demonstrate that \metabbr consistently outperforms baselines on complex, long-horizon tasks from OGBench and can be applied to improve the performance of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models that predict action sequences, significantly improving performance in both RoboCasa Kitchen simulation tasks and real-world manipulation tasks.