Less is more: Clustered Cross-Covariance Control for Offline RL

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission502 Authors

Keywords: reinforcement learning;offline RL; OOD area; Clustering-based RL;

TL;DR: Squared error in offline RL induces TD cross covariance. We mitigate it with clustered replay $C^4$ and a gradient penalty, keeping guarantees and improving stability with up to 30% higher returns.

Abstract: A fundamental challenge in offline reinforcement learning is distributional shift. Scarce data or datasets dominated by out-of-distribution (OOD) areas exacerbate this issue. Our theoretical analysis and experiments show that the standard squared error objective induces a harmful TD cross covariance. This effect amplifies in OOD areas, biasing optimization and degrading policy learning. To counteract this mechanism, we develop two complementary strategies: partitioned buffer sampling that restricts updates to localized replay partitions, attenuates irregular covariance effects, and aligns update directions, yielding a scheme that is easy to integrate with existing implementations, namely Clustered Cross-Covariance Control for TD ($C^4$). We also introduce an explicit gradient-based corrective penalty that cancels the covariance induced bias within each update. We prove that buffer partitioning preserves the lower bound property of the maximization objective, and that these constraints mitigate excessive conservatism in extreme OOD areas without altering the core behavior of policy constrained offline reinforcement learning. Empirically, our method showcases higher stability and up to 30% improvement in returns over prior methods, especially with small datasets and splits that emphasize OOD areas.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

Submission Number: 502