{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-workflow-for-offline-model-free-robotic","title":"A Workflow for Offline Model-Free Robotic Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"2109.10813","date":"2021-09-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Aviral Kumar","Anikait Singh","Stephen Tian","Chelsea Finn","Sergey Levine"],"abstract":"Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning control policies by utilizing only prior experience, without any online interaction. This can allow robots to acquire generalizable skills from large and diverse datasets, without any costly or unsafe online data collection. Despite recent algorithmic advances in offline RL, applying these methods to real-world problems has proven challenging. Although offline RL methods can learn from prior data, there is no clear and well-understood process for making various design choices, from model architecture to algorithm hyperparameters, without actually evaluating the learned policies online. In this paper, our aim is to develop a practical workflow for using offline RL analogous to the relatively well-understood workflows for supervised learning problems. To this end, we devise a set of metrics and conditions that can be tracked over the course of offline training, and can inform the practitioner about how the algorithm and model architecture should be adjusted to improve final performance. Our workflow is derived from a conceptual understanding of the behavior of conservative offline RL algorithms and cross-validation in supervised learning. We demonstrate the efficacy of this workflow in producing effective policies without any online tuning, both in several simulated robotic learning scenarios and for three tasks on two distinct real robots, focusing on learning manipulation skills with raw image observations with sparse binary rewards. Explanatory video and additional results can be found at sites.google.com/view/offline-rl-workflow","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10813v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.10813v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-workflow-for-offline-model-free-robotic","repo_url":"https://github.com/Asap7772/OfflineRlWorkflow","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"offline-rl","task_name":"Offline RL"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2109.10813","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2109.10813"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/Asap7772/OfflineRlWorkflow","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":2},"by_repo_kind":{"listed":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"13f63c50822ba4bf","entry":"process_buffer","repo":"Asap7772/OfflineRlWorkflow","repo_kind":"listed","path":"examples/cql_workflow.py","file_url":"https://github.com/Asap7772/OfflineRlWorkflow/blob/HEAD/examples/cql_workflow.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"13f63c50822ba4bf"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"668d7662a11b9a9d","entry":"process_buffer","repo":"Asap7772/OfflineRlWorkflow","repo_kind":"listed","path":"examples/brac_workflow.py","file_url":"https://github.com/Asap7772/OfflineRlWorkflow/blob/HEAD/examples/brac_workflow.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"668d7662a11b9a9d"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}