Paper ID: 2309.08925

DOMAIN: MilDly COnservative Model-BAsed OfflINe Reinforcement Learning

Xiao-Yin Liu, Xiao-Hu Zhou, Xiao-Liang Xie, Shi-Qi Liu, Zhen-Qiu Feng, Hao Li, Mei-Jiang Gui, Tian-Yu Xiang, De-Xing Huang, Zeng-Guang Hou

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL), which learns environment model from offline dataset and generates more out-of-distribution model data, has become an effective approach to the problem of distribution shift in offline RL. Due to the gap between the learned and actual environment, conservatism should be incorporated into the algorithm to balance accurate offline data and imprecise model data. The conservatism of current algorithms mostly relies on model uncertainty estimation. However, uncertainty estimation is unreliable and leads to poor performance in certain scenarios, and the previous methods ignore differences between the model data, which brings great conservatism. Therefore, this paper proposes a milDly cOnservative Model-bAsed offlINe RL algorithm (DOMAIN) without estimating model uncertainty to address the above issues. DOMAIN introduces adaptive sampling distribution of model samples, which can adaptively adjust the model data penalty. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate that the Q value learned by the DOMAIN outside the region is a lower bound of the true Q value, the DOMAIN is less conservative than previous model-based offline RL algorithms and has the guarantee of security policy improvement. The results of extensive experiments show that DOMAIN outperforms prior RL algorithms on the D4RL dataset benchmark, and achieves better performance than other RL algorithms on tasks that require generalization.

Submitted: Sep 16, 2023