Improving Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning with Q Conditioned State Entropy Exploration

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission6927 Authors

Keywords: Offline-to-online Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Studying how to fine-tune offline reinforcement learning (RL) pre-trained policy is profoundly significant for enhancing the sample efficiency of RL algorithms. However, directly fine-tuning pre-trained policies often results in sub-optimal performance. This is primarily due to the distribution shift between offline pre-training and online fine-tuning stages. Specifically, the distribution shift limits the acquisition of effective online samples, ultimately impacting the online fine-tuning performance. In order to narrow down the distribution shift between offline and online stages, we proposed Q conditioned state entropy (QCSE) as intrinsic reward. Specifically, QCSE maximizes the state entropy of all samples individually, considering their respective Q values. This approach encourages exploration of low-frequency samples while penalizing high-frequency ones, and implicitly achieves State Marginal Matching (SMM), thereby ensuring optimal performance, solving the asymptotic sub-optimality of constraint-based approaches. Additionally, QCSE can seamlessly integrate into various RL algorithms, enhancing online fine-tuning performance. To validate our claim, we conduct extensive experiments, and observe significant improvements with QCSE ( about 10.9% for CQL and 8% for Cal-QL). Furthermore, we extended experimental tests to other algorithms, affirming the generality of QCSE.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

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Submission Number: 6927