Contrastive Example-Based Control
It addresses challenges in reinforcement learning for real-world problems where environment interaction is expensive and reward specification is difficult, offering a simpler alternative to complex prior methods.
The paper tackles the problem of offline, example-based control by learning an implicit model of multi-step transitions instead of a reward function, achieving improved performance, robustness, and scaling across state-based and image-based tasks compared to baseline methods.
While many real-world problems that might benefit from reinforcement learning, these problems rarely fit into the MDP mold: interacting with the environment is often expensive and specifying reward functions is challenging. Motivated by these challenges, prior work has developed data-driven approaches that learn entirely from samples from the transition dynamics and examples of high-return states. These methods typically learn a reward function from high-return states, use that reward function to label the transitions, and then apply an offline RL algorithm to these transitions. While these methods can achieve good results on many tasks, they can be complex, often requiring regularization and temporal difference updates. In this paper, we propose a method for offline, example-based control that learns an implicit model of multi-step transitions, rather than a reward function. We show that this implicit model can represent the Q-values for the example-based control problem. Across a range of state-based and image-based offline control tasks, our method outperforms baselines that use learned reward functions; additional experiments demonstrate improved robustness and scaling with dataset size.