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arXiv · 2410.18626

SAMG: Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning via State-Action-Conditional Offline Model Guidance

Liyu Zhang·Haochi Wu·Xu Wan·Quan Kong·Ruilong Deng·Mingyang Sun
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Abstract

Offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning (RL) pre-trains models on offline data and refines policies through online fine-tuning. However, existing O2O RL algorithms typically require maintaining the tedious offline datasets to mitigate the effects of out-of-distribution (OOD) data, which significantly limits their efficiency in exploiting online samples. To address this deficiency, we introduce a new paradigm for O2O RL called State-Action-Conditional Offline \Model Guidance (SAMG). It freezes the pre-trained offline critic to provide compact offline understanding for each state-action sample, thus eliminating the need for retraining on offline data. The frozen offline critic is incorporated with the online target critic weighted by a state-action-adaptive coefficient. This coefficient aims to capture the offline degree of samples at the state-action level, and is updated adaptively during training. In practice, SAMG could be easily integrated with Q-function-based algorithms. Theoretical analysis shows good optimality and lower estimation error. Empirically, SAMG outperforms state-of-the-art O2O RL algorithms on the D4RL benchmark.

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Liyu Zhang, Haochi Wu, Xu Wan, Quan Kong, Ruilong Deng, Mingyang Sun. 2025-02-21. SAMG: Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning via State-Action-Conditional Offline Model Guidance. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18626

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