Towards Flexible Inference in Sequential Decision Problems via Bidirectional Transformers

Note: This is paper is superseded by the full version (Carroll et al., 2022). Randomly masking and predicting word tokens has been a successful approach in pre-training language models for a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we observe that the same idea also applies naturally to sequential decision making, where many well-studied tasks like behavior cloning, offline RL, inverse dynamics, and waypoint conditioning correspond to different sequence maskings over a sequence of states, actions, and returns. We introduce the FlexiBiT framework, which provides a unified way to specify models which can be trained on many different sequential decision making tasks. We show that a single FlexiBiT model is simultaneously capable of carrying out many tasks with performance similar to or better than specialized models. Additionally, we show that performance can be further improved by fine-tuning our general model on specific tasks of interest. Masked language modeling (Devlin et al., 2018) is a key technique in natural language processing (NLP). Under this paradigm, models are trained to predict randomly-masked subsets of tokens in a sequence.