Corruption-Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning with General Function Approximation
This work addresses robustness to data corruption in offline RL, which is crucial for real-world applications where datasets may be noisy or tampered, though it is incremental as it builds on existing robust online RL techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of corruption robustness in offline reinforcement learning with general function approximation, where an adversary corrupts the dataset, and proposes an algorithm that achieves a suboptimality bound worsened by an additive factor of O(ζ(C(̂ℱ,μ)n)^{-1}) under single policy coverage, matching the lower bound for linear MDPs with O(ζd n^{-1}).
We investigate the problem of corruption robustness in offline reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation, where an adversary can corrupt each sample in the offline dataset, and the corruption level $ζ\geq0$ quantifies the cumulative corruption amount over $n$ episodes and $H$ steps. Our goal is to find a policy that is robust to such corruption and minimizes the suboptimality gap with respect to the optimal policy for the uncorrupted Markov decision processes (MDPs). Drawing inspiration from the uncertainty-weighting technique from the robust online RL setting \citep{he2022nearly,ye2022corruptionrobust}, we design a new uncertainty weight iteration procedure to efficiently compute on batched samples and propose a corruption-robust algorithm for offline RL. Notably, under the assumption of single policy coverage and the knowledge of $ζ$, our proposed algorithm achieves a suboptimality bound that is worsened by an additive factor of $\mathcal{O}(ζ(C(\widehat{\mathcal{F}},μ)n)^{-1})$ due to the corruption. Here $\widehat{\mathcal{F}}$ is the confidence set, and the dataset $\mathcal{Z}_n^H$, and $C(\widehat{\mathcal{F}},μ)$ is a coefficient that depends on $\widehat{\mathcal{F}}$ and the underlying data distribution $μ$. When specialized to linear MDPs, the corruption-dependent error term reduces to $\mathcal{O}(ζd n^{-1})$ with $d$ being the dimension of the feature map, which matches the existing lower bound for corrupted linear MDPs. This suggests that our analysis is tight in terms of the corruption-dependent term.