ICML 2023

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Poster

What is Essential for Unseen Goal Generalization of Offline Goal-conditioned RL?

Rui Yang · Yong LIN · Xiaoteng Ma · Hao Hu · Chongjie Zhang · Tong Zhang

Thu Jul 27 04:30 PM -- 06:00 PM (PDT) @ Exhibit Hall 1 #422

in Poster Session 6 »

Offline goal-conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a way to train general-purpose agents from fully offline datasets. In addition to being conservative within the dataset, the generalization ability to achieve unseen goals is another fundamental challenge for offline GCRL. However, to the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been well studied yet. In this paper, we study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of offline GCRL both theoretically and empirically to identify factors that are important. In a number of experiments, we observe that weighted imitation learning enjoys better generalization than pessimism-based offline RL method. Based on this insight, we derive a theory for OOD generalization, which characterizes several important design choices. We then propose a new offline GCRL method, Generalizable Offline goAl-condiTioned RL (GOAT), by combining the findings from our theoretical and empirical studies. On a new benchmark containing 9 independent identically distributed (IID) tasks and 17 OOD tasks, GOAT outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

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Author Information

Rui Yang (the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

I'm a first year Ph.D. student at CSE, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, supervised by Prof. Tong Zhang. I received my master's degree and bachelor's degree from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University. My research interests lie in deep reinforcement learning (RL), especially goal-conditioned RL, offline RL and model-based RL. I'm also interested in the application of RL algorithms to game AI and robotics.

Yong LIN (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Xiaoteng Ma (Department of Automation, Tsinghua University)

Hao Hu (Tsinghua University)

Chongjie Zhang (Tsinghua University)

Tong Zhang (HKUST)

Tong Zhang is a professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests are machine learning, big data and their applications. He obtained a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Cornell University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Before joining HKUST, Tong Zhang was a professor at Rutgers University, and worked previously at IBM, Yahoo as research scientists, Baidu as the director of Big Data Lab, and Tencent as the founding director of AI Lab. Tong Zhang was an ASA fellow and IMS fellow, and has served as the chair or area-chair in major machine learning conferences such as NIPS, ICML, and COLT, and has served as associate editors in top machine learning journals such as PAMI, JMLR, and Machine Learning Journal.