"Reinforcement learning is learning what to do – how to map situations to actions – so as to maximize a numerical reward signal. The learner is not told which actions to take, as in most forms of machine learning, but instead must discover which actions yield the most reward by trying them." – Sutton, Richard S. and Andrew G. Barto. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. (1.1). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from pre-existing datasets without further interactions, making it a challenging task. Q-learning algorithms struggle withextrapolation errors inofflinesettings, while supervised learning methods are constrained by model expressiveness.
A finite episodic Markov decision process (MDP) is a tuple (S,A,H,ฮฑ,P,r) where S and A are the finite sets of states and actions withS = |S|,A = |A|, H is the (fixed) episode length andฮฑ is the initial state distribution.
This is particularly challenging for high-dimensional control tasks, in which there may be a large number of factors that influence the agent's objective.