Papers › Sparse-Reg: Improving Sample Complexity in Offline Reinforcement Learning using Sparsity

Sparse-Reg: Improving Sample Complexity in Offline Reinforcement Learning using Sparsity

20 Jun 2025arXiv:2506.17155archive 2025-07-28

Samin Yeasar Arnob, Scott Fujimoto, Doina Precup

In this paper, we investigate the use of small datasets in the context of offline reinforcement learning (RL). While many common offline RL benchmarks employ datasets with over a million data points, many offline RL applications rely on considerably smaller datasets. We show that offline RL algorithms can overfit on small datasets, resulting in poor performance. To address this challenge, we introduce "Sparse-Reg": a regularization technique based on sparsity to mitigate overfitting in offline reinforcement learning, enabling effective learning in limited data settings and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in continuous control.

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Continuous ControlOffline RLReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)continuous-controlreinforcement-learning

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