State-Constrained Offline Reinforcement Learning
This addresses the problem of restricted policy exploration in offline RL for researchers and practitioners, offering a novel approach that is incremental but with strong specific gains.
The paper tackles the limitation of batch-constrained offline RL by introducing a state-constrained framework that allows policies to take out-of-distribution actions leading to in-distribution states, enhancing learning potential and achieving state-of-the-art performance on D4RL benchmarks.
Traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods predominantly operate in a batch-constrained setting. This confines the algorithms to a specific state-action distribution present in the dataset, reducing the effects of distributional shift but restricting the policy to seen actions. In this paper, we alleviate this limitation by introducing state-constrained offline RL, a novel framework that focuses solely on the dataset's state distribution. This approach allows the policy to take high-quality out-of-distribution actions that lead to in-distribution states, significantly enhancing learning potential. The proposed setting not only broadens the learning horizon but also improves the ability to combine different trajectories from the dataset effectively, a desirable property inherent in offline RL. Our research is underpinned by theoretical findings that pave the way for subsequent advancements in this area. Additionally, we introduce StaCQ, a deep learning algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmark datasets and aligns with our theoretical propositions. StaCQ establishes a strong baseline for forthcoming explorations in this domain.