NeurIPS 2024spotlight2 citations

Exclusively Penalized Q-learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Junghyuk Yeom, Yonghyeon Jo, Jeongmo Kim, Sanghyeon Lee, Seungyul Han

Abstract

Constraint-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) involves policy constraints or imposing penalties on the value function to mitigate overestimation errors caused by distributional shift. This paper focuses on a limitation in existing offline RL methods with penalized value function, indicating the potential for underestimation bias due to unnecessary bias introduced in the value function. To address this concern, we propose Exclusively Penalized Q-learning (EPQ), which reduces estimation bias in the value function by selectively penalizing states that are prone to inducing estimation errors. Numerical results show that our method significantly reduces underestimation bias and improves performance in various offline control tasks compared to other offline RL methods.

Deep reinforcement learningoffline RLQ-learningoverestimation reduction
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
yeom2024exclusively,
title={Exclusively Penalized Q-learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning},
author={Junghyuk Yeom and Yonghyeon Jo and Jeongmo Kim and Sanghyeon Lee and Seungyul Han},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=2bdSnxeQcW}
}