{"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/leveraging-skills-from-unlabeled-prior-data","title":"Leveraging Skills from Unlabeled Prior Data for Efficient Online Exploration","arxiv_id":"2410.18076","date":"2024-10-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Max Wilcoxson","Qiyang Li","Kevin Frans","Sergey Levine"],"abstract":"Unsupervised pretraining has been transformative in many supervised domains. However, applying such ideas to reinforcement learning (RL) presents a unique challenge in that fine-tuning does not involve mimicking task-specific data, but rather exploring and locating the solution through iterative self-improvement. In this work, we study how unlabeled prior trajectory data can be leveraged to learn efficient exploration strategies. While prior data can be used to pretrain a set of low-level skills, or as additional off-policy data for online RL, it has been unclear how to combine these ideas effectively for online exploration. Our method SUPE (Skills from Unlabeled Prior data for Exploration) demonstrates that a careful combination of these ideas compounds their benefits. Our method first extracts low-level skills using a variational autoencoder (VAE), and then pseudo-relabels unlabeled trajectories using an optimistic reward model, transforming prior data into high-level, task-relevant examples. Finally, SUPE uses these transformed examples as additional off-policy data for online RL to learn a high-level policy that composes pretrained low-level skills to explore efficiently. We empirically show that SUPE reliably outperforms prior strategies, successfully solving a suite of long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Code: https://github.com/rail-berkeley/supe.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18076v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18076v2.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":"leveraging-skills-from-unlabeled-prior-data","repo_url":"https://github.com/rail-berkeley/supe","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"jax","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"efficient-exploration","task_name":"Efficient Exploration"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.18076","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.18076"}},"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. 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