Sparsity-based Safety Conservatism for Constrained Offline Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a sparsity-based safety conservatism approach for offline reinforcement learning, focusing on mitigating interpolation errors and enhancing safety in data-sparse, safety-critical environments.

Contribution

It proposes conservative metrics derived from data sparsity to improve safety and generalizability in offline RL without complex bi-level optimization.

Findings

Conservative metrics effectively identify high-risk regions in data-sparse areas.

The approach outperforms bi-level cost-ub-maximization in safety and simplicity.

Method demonstrates robustness across various offline RL tasks.

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made notable success in decision-making fields like autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. Yet, its reliance on real-time feedback poses challenges in costly or hazardous settings. Furthermore, RL's training approach, centered on "on-policy" sampling, doesn't fully capitalize on data. Hence, Offline RL has emerged as a compelling alternative, particularly in conducting additional experiments is impractical, and abundant datasets are available. However, the challenge of distributional shift (extrapolation), indicating the disparity between data distributions and learning policies, also poses a risk in offline RL, potentially leading to significant safety breaches due to estimation errors (interpolation). This concern is particularly pronounced in safety-critical domains, where real-world problems are prevalent. To address both extrapolation and interpolation errors, numerous studies have introduced additional constraints to confine policy behavior, steering it towards more cautious decision-making. While many studies have addressed extrapolation errors, fewer have focused on providing effective solutions for tackling interpolation errors. For example, some works tackle this issue by incorporating potential cost-maximizing optimization by perturbing the original dataset. However, this, involving a bi-level optimization structure, may introduce significant instability or complicate problem-solving in high-dimensional tasks. This motivates us to pinpoint areas where hazards may be more prevalent than initially estimated based on the sparsity of available data by providing significant insight into constrained offline RL. In this paper, we present conservative metrics based on data sparsity that demonstrate the high generalizability to any methods and efficacy compared to using bi-level cost-ub-maximization.