Should I Use Offline RL or Imitation Learning?

Figure 1: Summary of our recommendations for when a practitioner should BC and various imitation learning style methods, and when they should use offline RL approaches.

Offline reinforcement learning allows learning policies from previously collected data, which has profound implications for applying RL in domains where running trial-and-error learning is impractical or dangerous, such as safety-critical settings like autonomous driving or medical treatment planning. In such scenarios, online exploration is simply too risky, but offline RL methods can learn effective …

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