Boosting Offline Reinforcement Learning with Action Preference Query
Qisen Yang Shenzhi Wang Matthieu Gaetan Lin Shiji Song Gao Huang
Training practical agents usually involve offline and online reinforcement
learning (RL) to balance the policy's performance and interaction costs. In
particular, online fine-tuning has become a commonly used method to correct the
erroneous estimates of out-of-distribution data learned in the offline training
phase. However, even limited online interactions can be inaccessible or
catastrophic for high-stake scenarios like healthcare and autonomous driving.
In this work, we introduce an interaction-free training scheme dubbed
Offline-with-Action-Preferences (OAP). The main insight is that, compared to
online fine-tuning, querying the preferences between pre-collected and learned
actions can be equally or even more helpful to the erroneous estimate problem.
By adaptively encouraging or suppressing policy constraint according to action
preferences, OAP could distinguish overestimation from beneficial policy
improvement and thus attains a more accurate evaluation of unseen data.
Theoretically, we prove a lower bound of the behavior policy's performance
improvement brought by OAP. Moreover, comprehensive experiments on the D4RL
benchmark and state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate that OAP yields higher
(29% on average) scores, especially on challenging AntMaze tasks (98% higher).