{"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/conservative-bayesian-model-based-value","title":"Conservative Bayesian Model-Based Value Expansion for Offline Policy Optimization","arxiv_id":"2210.03802","date":"2022-10-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jihwan Jeong","Xiaoyu Wang","Michael Gimelfarb","Hyunwoo Kim","Baher Abdulhai","Scott Sanner"],"abstract":"Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of learning a performant policy from a fixed batch of data collected by following some behavior policy. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing in the offline setting since they can extract more learning signals from the logged dataset by learning a model of the environment. However, the performance of existing model-based approaches falls short of model-free counterparts, due to the compounding of estimation errors in the learned model. Driven by this observation, we argue that it is critical for a model-based method to understand when to trust the model and when to rely on model-free estimates, and how to act conservatively w.r.t. both. To this end, we derive an elegant and simple methodology called conservative Bayesian model-based value expansion for offline policy optimization (CBOP), that trades off model-free and model-based estimates during the policy evaluation step according to their epistemic uncertainties, and facilitates conservatism by taking a lower bound on the Bayesian posterior value estimate. On the standard D4RL continuous control tasks, we find that our method significantly outperforms previous model-based approaches: e.g., MOPO by $116.4$%, MOReL by $23.2$% and COMBO by $23.7$%. Further, CBOP achieves state-of-the-art performance on $11$ out of $18$ benchmark datasets while doing on par on the remaining datasets.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03802v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.03802v2.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":"conservative-bayesian-model-based-value","repo_url":"https://github.com/jihwan-jeong/cbop","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"d4rl","task_name":"D4RL"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.03802","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}