Offline Reinforcement Learning With Combinatorial Action Spaces

27 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: reinforcement learning, offline reinforcement learning, combinatorial action space
Abstract: Reinforcement learning problems often involve large action spaces arising from the simultaneous execution of multiple sub-actions, resulting in combinatorial action spaces. Learning in combinatorial action spaces is difficult due to the exponential growth in action space size with the number of sub-actions and the dependencies among these sub-actions. In offline settings, this challenge is compounded by limited and suboptimal data. Current methods for offline learning in combinatorial spaces simplify the problem by assuming sub-action independence. We propose Branch Value Estimation (BVE), which effectively captures sub-action dependencies and scales to large combinatorial spaces by learning to evaluate only a small subset of actions at each timestep. Our experiments show that BVE outperforms state-of-the-art methods across a range of action space sizes.
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
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Submission Number: 11561
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