A Simple Unified Uncertainty-Guided Framework for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

Siyuan Guo, Yanchao Sun, Jifeng Hu, Sili Huang, Hechang Chen, Haiyin Piao, Lichao Sun, Yi Chang

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising solution to learning an agent fully relying on a data-driven paradigm. However, constrained by the limited quality of the offline dataset, its performance is often suboptimal. Therefore, it is desired to further finetune the agent via extra online interactions before deployment. Unfortunately, offline-to-online RL can be challenging due to two main challenges: constrained exploratory behavior and state–action distribution shift. In view of this, we propose a simple unified uncertainty-guided (SUNG) framework, which naturally unifies the solution to both challenges with the tool of uncertainty. Specifically, SUNG quantifies uncertainty via a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based state–action visitation density estimator. To facilitate efficient exploration, SUNG presents a practical optimistic exploration strategy to select informative actions with both high value and high uncertainty. Moreover, SUNG develops an adaptive exploitation method by applying conservative offline RL objectives to high-uncertainty samples and standard online RL objectives to low-uncertainty samples to smoothly bridge offline and online stages. SUNG achieves state-of-the-art online finetuning performance when combined with different offline RL methods, across various environments and datasets in the D4RL benchmark. Codes are made publicly available in https://github.com/guosyjlu/ACBR

External IDs:doi:10.1109/tnnls.2025.3633997