{"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/model-advantage-optimization-for-model-based","title":"Model-Advantage and Value-Aware Models for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning: Bridging the Gap in Theory and Practice","arxiv_id":"2106.14080","date":"2021-06-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nirbhay Modhe","Harish Kamath","Dhruv Batra","Ashwin Kalyan"],"abstract":"This work shows that value-aware model learning, known for its numerous theoretical benefits, is also practically viable for solving challenging continuous control tasks in prevalent model-based reinforcement learning algorithms. First, we derive a novel value-aware model learning objective by bounding the model-advantage i.e. model performance difference, between two MDPs or models given a fixed policy, achieving superior performance to prior value-aware objectives in most continuous control environments. Second, we identify the issue of stale value estimates in naively substituting value-aware objectives in place of maximum-likelihood in dyna-style model-based RL algorithms. Our proposed remedy to this issue bridges the long-standing gap in theory and practice of value-aware model learning by enabling successful deployment of all value-aware objectives in solving several continuous control robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks. Our results are obtained with minimal modifications to two popular and open-source model-based RL algorithms -- SLBO and MBPO, without tuning any existing hyper-parameters, while also demonstrating better performance of value-aware objectives than these baseline in some environments.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14080v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.14080v2.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":"model-advantage-optimization-for-model-based","repo_url":"https://github.com/batra-mlp-lab/va_mbrl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"model-based-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Model-based Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"},{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"aware","method_name":"AWARE"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}