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Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Data

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arxiv 2302.02948 v4 pith:2WNJ33BK submitted 2023-02-06 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords dataexistinglearningofflineonlineadditionalapplyexpert
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abstract

Sample efficiency and exploration remain major challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL). A powerful approach that can be applied to address these issues is the inclusion of offline data, such as prior trajectories from a human expert or a sub-optimal exploration policy. Previous methods have relied on extensive modifications and additional complexity to ensure the effective use of this data. Instead, we ask: can we simply apply existing off-policy methods to leverage offline data when learning online? In this work, we demonstrate that the answer is yes; however, a set of minimal but important changes to existing off-policy RL algorithms are required to achieve reliable performance. We extensively ablate these design choices, demonstrating the key factors that most affect performance, and arrive at a set of recommendations that practitioners can readily apply, whether their data comprise a small number of expert demonstrations or large volumes of sub-optimal trajectories. We see that correct application of these simple recommendations can provide a $\mathbf{2.5\times}$ improvement over existing approaches across a diverse set of competitive benchmarks, with no additional computational overhead. We have released our code at https://github.com/ikostrikov/rlpd.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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