Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning -- Identifiability Challenges and Effective Data Collection Strategies

Consider the following instance of the Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) problem: given the complete training logs of N conventional RL agents, trained on N different tasks, design a meta-agent that can quickly maximize reward in a new, unseen task from the same task distribution. In particular, while each conventional RL agent explored and exploited its own different task, the meta-agent must identify regularities in the data that lead to effective exploration/exploitation in the unseen task. Here, we take a Bayesian RL (BRL) view, and seek to learn a Bayes-optimal policy from the offline data. Building on the recent VariBAD BRL approach, we develop an off-policy BRL method that learns to plan an exploration strategy based on an adaptive neural belief estimate. However, learning to infer such a belief from offline data brings a new identifiability issue we term MDP ambiguity.