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Offline RL: A Technical Survey (arxiv.org)
1 point by sql-hkr 350 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Offline reinforcement learning trains agents from saved logs of past experience instead of risky trial-and-error in the real world. This survey sorts methods into one shared taxonomy and compares them across benchmark datasets, showing which classes win under different data conditions and naming open problems.

Abstract · A Survey on Offline Reinforcement Learning: Taxonomy, Review, and Open Problems

With the widespread adoption of deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has experienced a dramatic increase in popularity, scaling to previously intractable problems, such as playing complex games from pixel observations, sustaining conversations with humans, and controlling robotic agents. However, there is still a wide range of domains inaccessible to RL due to the high cost and danger of interacting with the environment. Offline RL is a paradigm that learns exclusively from static datasets of previously collected interactions, making it feasible to extract policies from large and diverse training datasets. Effective offline RL algorithms have a much wider range of applications than online RL, being particularly appealing for real-world applications, such as education, healthcare, and robotics. In this work, we contribute with a unifying taxonomy to classify offline RL methods. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive review of the latest algorithmic breakthroughs in the field using a unified notation as well as a review of existing benchmarks' properties and shortcomings. Additionally, we provide a figure that summarizes the performance of each method and class of methods on different dataset properties, equipping researchers with the tools to decide which type of algorithm is best suited for the problem at hand and identify which classes of algorithms look the most promising. Finally, we provide our perspective on open problems and propose future research directions for this rapidly growing field.

Rafael Figueiredo Prudencio, Marcos R. O. A. Maximo, Esther Luna Colombini
arXiv:2203.01387 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Mar 2, 2022 · updated Apr 19, 2023
abstract · pdf · 21 pages; Final version accepted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems

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