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Article
Offline Reinforcement Learning with Causal Structured World Models
arXiv
  • Zheng-Mao Zhu, National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China
  • Xiong-Hui Chen, National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China & Polixir.ai, China
  • Hong-Long Tian, National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China
  • Kun Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Yang Yu, National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China & Polixir.ai, China & Peng Cheng Laboratory, China
Document Type
Article
Abstract

Model-based methods have recently shown promising for offline reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to learn good policies from historical data without interacting with the environment. Previous model-based offline RL methods learn fully connected nets as world-models to map the states and actions to the next-step states. However, it is sensible that a world-model should adhere to the underlying causal effect such that it will support learning an effective policy generalizing well in unseen states. In this paper, We first provide theoretical results that causal world-models can outperform plain world-models for offline RL by incorporating the causal structure into the generalization error bound. We then propose a practical algorithm, oFfline mOdel-based reinforcement learning with CaUsal Structure (FOCUS), to illustrate the feasibility of learning and leveraging causal structure in offline RL. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that FOCUS reconstructs the underlying causal structure accurately and robustly. Consequently, it performs better than the plain model-based offline RL algorithms and other causal model-based RL algorithms. © 2022, CC BY.

DOI
10.48550/arXiv.2206.01474
Publication Date
6-3-2022
Keywords
  • Learning systems,
  • Historical data,
  • Learn+,
  • Model-based method,
  • Model-based OPC,
  • Model-based reinforcement learning,
  • Offline,
  • Reinforcement learning algorithms,
  • Reinforcement learning method,
  • Reinforcement learnings,
  • World model,
  • Reinforcement learning,
  • Machine Learning (cs.LG),
  • Machine Learning (stat.ML)
Comments

Preprint: arXiv

Archived with thanks to arXiv

Preprint License: CC by 4.0

Uploaded 14 July 2022

Citation Information
Z.M. Zhu, X.H. Chen, H.L. Tian, K. Zhang and Y. Yu, "Offline Reinforcement Learning with Causal Structured World Models", 2022, arXiv:2206.01474