Unleashing the Power of Pre-trained Language Models for Offline Reinforcement Learning
This work addresses the problem of costly and risky data collection in real-world offline RL for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Decision Transformers and language model techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of offline reinforcement learning with limited in-domain data by introducing LaMo, a framework that uses pre-trained language models to enhance Decision Transformers, achieving excellent performance in sparse-reward tasks and closing the gap with value-based methods in dense-reward tasks, particularly in data-limited scenarios.
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a near-optimal policy using pre-collected datasets. In real-world scenarios, data collection could be costly and risky; therefore, offline RL becomes particularly challenging when the in-domain data is limited. Given recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their few-shot learning prowess, this paper introduces $\textbf{La}$nguage Models for $\textbf{Mo}$tion Control ($\textbf{LaMo}$), a general framework based on Decision Transformers to effectively use pre-trained Language Models (LMs) for offline RL. Our framework highlights four crucial components: (1) Initializing Decision Transformers with sequentially pre-trained LMs, (2) employing the LoRA fine-tuning method, in contrast to full-weight fine-tuning, to combine the pre-trained knowledge from LMs and in-domain knowledge effectively, (3) using the non-linear MLP transformation instead of linear projections, to generate embeddings, and (4) integrating an auxiliary language prediction loss during fine-tuning to stabilize the LMs and retain their original abilities on languages. Empirical results indicate $\textbf{LaMo}$ achieves excellent performance in sparse-reward tasks and closes the gap between value-based offline RL methods and decision transformers in dense-reward tasks. In particular, our method demonstrates superior performance in scenarios with limited data samples.