Addressing Optimism Bias in Sequence Modeling for Reinforcement Learning

July 2022

Addressing Optimism Bias in Sequence Modeling for Reinforcement Learning

Conference Paper
Proceedings of (ICML) International Conference on Machine Learning

Abstract:

Impressive results in natural language processing (NLP) based on the Transformer neural network architecture have inspired researchers to explore viewing offline reinforcement learning (RL) as a generic sequence modeling problem. Recent works based on this paradigm have achieved state-of-the-art results in several of the mostly deterministic offline Atari and D4RL benchmarks. However, because these methods jointly model the states and actions as a single sequencing problem, they struggle to disentangle the effects of the policy and world dynamics on the return. Thus, in adversarial or stochastic environments, these methods lead to overly optimistic behavior that can be dangerous in safety-critical systems like autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a method that addresses this optimism bias by explicitly disentangling the policy and world models, which allows us at test time to search for policies that are robust to multiple possible futures in the environment. We demonstrate our method's superior performance on a variety of autonomous driving tasks in simulation.
@conference{Villaflor-2022-134789,
author = {Adam Villaflor And Zhe Huang And Swapnil Pande And John M. Dolan And Jeff Schneider},
title = {Addressing Optimism Bias in Sequence Modeling for Reinforcement Learning},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICML) International Conference on Machine Learning},
year = {2022},
month = {July},
pages = {22270 - 22283},
keywords = {offline reinforcement learning, optimism bias},
}
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