Cross-Domain Offline Policy Adaptation with Optimal Transport and Dataset Constraint

Jiafei Lyu, Mengbei Yan, Zhongjian Qiao, Runze Liu, Xiaoteng Ma, Deheng Ye, Jing-Wen Yang, Zongqing Lu, Xiu Li

Keywords: cross-domain, reinforcement learning, offline RL, optimal transport

TL;DR: We propose a simple yet effective method that leverages optimal transport and support constraint for efficient cross-domain offline RL.

Abstract: We explore cross-domain offline reinforcement learning (RL) where offline datasets from another domain can be accessed to facilitate policy learning. However, the underlying environments of the two datasets may have dynamics mismatches, incurring inferior performance when simply merging the data of two domains. Existing methods mitigate this issue by training domain classifiers, using contrastive learning methods, etc. Nevertheless, they still rely on a large amount of target domain data to function well. Instead, we address this problem by establishing a concrete performance bound of a policy given datasets from two domains. Motivated by the theoretical insights, we propose to align transitions in the two datasets using optimal transport and selectively share source domain samples, without training any neural networks. This enables reliable data filtering even given a few target domain data. Additionally, we introduce a dataset regularization term that ensures the learned policy remains within the scope of the target domain dataset, preventing it from being biased towards the source domain data. Consequently, we propose the Optimal Transport Data Filtering (dubbed OTDF) method and examine its effectiveness by conducting extensive experiments across various dynamics shift conditions (e.g., gravity shift), given limited target domain data. It turns out that OTDF exhibits superior performance on many tasks and dataset qualities, often surpassing prior strong baselines by a large margin.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

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Submission Number: 4658