DeepAveragers: Offline Reinforcement Learning By Solving Derived Non-Parametric MDPs
Authors: Aayam Kumar Shrestha, Stefan Lee, Prasad Tadepalli, Alan Fern
Venue: ICLR 2021 Spotlight
Keywords: Offline Reinforcement Learning, Planning
Abstract: We study an approach to offline reinforcement learning (RL) based on optimally solving  finitely-represented  MDPs  derived  from  a  static  dataset  of  experience. This approach can be applied on top of any learned representation and has the potential to easily support multiple solution objectives as well as zero-shot adjustment to changing environments and goals.  Our main contribution is to introduce the Deep Averagers with Costs MDP (DAC-MDP) and to investigate its solutions for offline RL.  DAC-MDPs are a non-parametric model that can leverage deep representations and account for limited data by introducing costs for exploiting under-represented parts of the model.  In theory, we show conditions that allow for lower-bounding the performance of DAC-MDP solutions. We also investigate the empirical behavior in a number of environments, including those with image-based observations. Overall, the experiments demonstrate that the framework can work in practice and scale to large complex offline RL problems.