Decision Transformer casts RL as autoregressive sequence modeling conditioned on desired returns, past states and actions, matching or exceeding offline RL baselines on Atari, Gym and Key-to-Door tasks.
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AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasets
Canonical reference. 70% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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70% of classified citations
abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an appealing formalism for learning control policies from experience. However, the classic active formulation of RL necessitates a lengthy active exploration process for each behavior, making it difficult to apply in real-world settings such as robotic control. If we can instead allow RL algorithms to effectively use previously collected data to aid the online learning process, such applications could be made substantially more practical: the prior data would provide a starting point that mitigates challenges due to exploration and sample complexity, while the online training enables the agent to perfect the desired skill. Such prior data could either constitute expert demonstrations or sub-optimal prior data that illustrates potentially useful transitions. While a number of prior methods have either used optimal demonstrations to bootstrap RL, or have used sub-optimal data to train purely offline, it remains exceptionally difficult to train a policy with offline data and actually continue to improve it further with online RL. In this paper we analyze why this problem is so challenging, and propose an algorithm that combines sample efficient dynamic programming with maximum likelihood policy updates, providing a simple and effective framework that is able to leverage large amounts of offline data and then quickly perform online fine-tuning of RL policies. We show that our method, advantage weighted actor critic (AWAC), enables rapid learning of skills with a combination of prior demonstration data and online experience. We demonstrate these benefits on simulated and real-world robotics domains, including dexterous manipulation with a real multi-fingered hand, drawer opening with a robotic arm, and rotating a valve. Our results show that incorporating prior data can reduce the time required to learn a range of robotic skills to practical time-scales.
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representative citing papers
D4RL supplies new offline RL benchmarks and datasets from expert and mixed sources to expose weaknesses in existing algorithms and standardize evaluation.
FAV aligns few-step generative models by amortizing SVGD updates from reward-tilted sampling into generator parameters via fixed-point regression, requiring only sample access, and shows outperformance on robotics tasks plus scaling on image generators.
DRATS derives a minimax objective from a feasibility formulation of MTRL to adaptively sample tasks with the largest return gaps, leading to better worst-task performance on MetaWorld benchmarks.
Flow map policies enable fast one-step inference for flow-based RL policies, and FMQ provides an optimal closed-form Q-guided target for offline-to-online adaptation under trust-region constraints, achieving SOTA performance.
Anchor-TS defines arm indices as the median of an online posterior sample, a hybrid posterior sample, and the online sample mean to correct distribution-shift bias and safely accelerate online learning with offline data.
Reference-sampled weighted SFT with prompt-normalized Boltzmann weights induces the same policy as fixed-reference KL-regularized RLVR, with BOLT as the estimator and a finite one-shot error decomposition separating coverage, variance, and other terms.
DARE performs sample-level constraint relaxation in offline-to-online RL by conditioning on behavioral consistency with a behavior model via posterior-induced exchange, yielding improved fine-tuning stability and performance on D4RL benchmarks.
Reformulates constrained black-box optimization as posterior inference in latent space of flow-based models amortized by outsourced diffusion models, claiming superior performance on synthetic and real tasks.
DSRL steers pretrained diffusion policies for robotics by applying RL to their latent noise inputs, achieving sample-efficient real-world adaptation with only black-box access.
BiTrajDiff augments offline RL datasets by running independent forward and backward diffusion processes from intermediate states, yielding higher performance than prior one-directional data-augmentation baselines on D4RL.
Diffusion-QL uses conditional diffusion models as expressive policies in offline RL by coupling behavior cloning with Q-value maximization, achieving SOTA on most D4RL tasks.
DRIFT achieves multi-turn RL performance via offline importance-weighted SFT by leveraging the equivalence of KL-regularized RL to weighted supervised learning.
FLAG augments state space with flow latent variable to optimize a proxy MaxEnt-RL objective, enabling expressive policies with limited importance samples in high-dimensional control.
SPAR anchors policy learning to a frozen BC policy for residual rectification and introduces latent self-imitation to eliminate manifold drift, achieving SOTA on D4RL.
LEO enables efficient all-goals learning in goal-conditioned RL by jointly predicting for all goals in one network pass, yielding >250x speedup over relabelling and better performance on Craftax.
The paper introduces discipline stability, a trace-based evaluation paradigm for checking if RL agents maintain behavioral discipline like rule-based competitors in hidden-state competitive settings such as hotel pricing and bidding.
ROAD formulates data mixing as a bi-level optimization problem solved via multi-armed bandit to adaptively balance offline priors and online updates in RL.
DRIFT enables stable offline-to-online fine-tuning of CTMC policies in discrete RL via advantage-weighted discrete flow matching, path-space regularization, and candidate-set approximation.
ACSAC adaptively selects action chunk sizes via a causal Transformer Q-network in actor-critic RL, proves the Bellman operator is a contraction, and reports state-of-the-art results on long-horizon manipulation tasks.
DFP is a one-step generative policy using Wasserstein gradient flow on a drifting model backbone, with a top-K behavior cloning surrogate, that reaches SOTA on Robomimic and OGBench manipulation tasks.
In a hotel revenue-management simulator, standard RL agents game scalar RevPAR rewards under hidden competitor states, but Trace-Prior RL matches both revenue metrics and price distributions by training a stochastic policy with a KL penalty to a learned market prior.
SOPE dynamically controls offline training length in online RL using actor-aligned OPE on validation data to stop when benefits saturate, achieving up to 45.6% better performance and 22x less computation on Minari tasks.
Adaptive Q-Chunking selects optimal action chunk sizes at each state via normalized advantage comparisons to outperform fixed chunk sizes in offline-to-online RL on robot benchmarks.
citing papers explorer
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From Static Constraints to Dynamic Adaptation: Sample-Level Constraint Relaxation for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
DARE performs sample-level constraint relaxation in offline-to-online RL by conditioning on behavioral consistency with a behavior model via posterior-induced exchange, yielding improved fine-tuning stability and performance on D4RL benchmarks.
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Posterior Inference in Latent Space for Scalable Constrained Black-box Optimization
Reformulates constrained black-box optimization as posterior inference in latent space of flow-based models amortized by outsourced diffusion models, claiming superior performance on synthetic and real tasks.
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Steering Your Diffusion Policy with Latent Space Reinforcement Learning
DSRL steers pretrained diffusion policies for robotics by applying RL to their latent noise inputs, achieving sample-efficient real-world adaptation with only black-box access.
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BiTrajDiff: Bidirectional Trajectory Generation with Diffusion Models for Offline Reinforcement Learning
BiTrajDiff augments offline RL datasets by running independent forward and backward diffusion processes from intermediate states, yielding higher performance than prior one-directional data-augmentation baselines on D4RL.
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Pseudo-Expert Regularized Offline RL for End-to-End Autonomous Driving in Photorealistic Closed-Loop Environments
Pseudo-expert regularized offline RL reduces collisions and improves route completion for camera-based driving models trained on fixed simulator datasets from nuScenes.
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Reinforcement Learning with Action Chunking
Q-chunking improves offline-to-online RL sample efficiency on long-horizon sparse-reward manipulation tasks by applying action chunking to TD learning.
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VLA-RL: Towards Masterful and General Robotic Manipulation with Scalable Reinforcement Learning
VLA-RL applies online RL to pretrained VLAs, yielding a 4.5% gain over strong baselines on 40 LIBERO manipulation tasks and matching commercial models like π₀-FAST.
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COLSON: Controllable Learning-Based Social Navigation via Diffusion-Based Reinforcement Learning
COLSON applies diffusion models to reinforcement learning for social robot navigation and adds controllability mechanisms that enable zero-shot adaptation to unseen static obstacles and altered objectives.
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LLM-Guided Task- and Affordance-Level Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
LLM-TALE steers RL exploration using LLM-generated plans at task and affordance levels with online suboptimality correction, improving sample efficiency and success rates on pick-and-place tasks without human supervision.