OpenAI Blog

Plan online, learn offline: Efficient learning and exploration via model-based control

arXiv AI
Aug 13

Learning Loco-Manipulation From SMPC Demonstrations With Sparse Offline-to-Online RL

arXiv:2608. 12063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating locomotion and manipulation is essential for robot autonomy, but scaling standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) to complex tasks is severely bottlenecked by the slow, manual process of dense reward shaping.

By Martin Schuck, Maks Sorokin, Simone Manni, Duy Ta, Angela P. Schoellig, Marco Hutter, Simon Le Cleac'H, Jan Br\"udigam
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

Learning Loco-Manipulation From SMPC Demonstrations With Sparse Offline-to-Online RL

Integrating locomotion and manipulation is essential for robot autonomy, but scaling standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) to complex tasks is severely bottlenecked by the slow, manual process of dense reward shaping. To bypass this limitation, we leverage Sample-based Model Predictive Control (SMPC) entirely in simulation as an automated, rapidly tunable expert to generate massive offline datasets.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Fully Offline Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2505. 22442v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline RL (ORL) promises safe and sample-efficient deployment but existing methods rely on undocumented online interactions for hyperparameter tuning and lack reliable fully offline estimates of initial online performance.

By Mattie Fellows, Clarisse Wibault, Uljad Berdica, Johannes Forkel, Maike Osborne, Jakob N. Foerster
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

GEM-MPC: Balancing Exploration and Exploitation through Expert-Guided Planning

GEM-MPC is a reinforcement learning method that blends MPPI planning with policy learning to balance exploration and exploitation in high-dimensional continuous control tasks. It trains a policy to clone the planner while also maintaining a KL-regularized policy that explores around the planner’s suggestions, thereby improving the synergy between planning and learning. The approach introduces Gated Prior Distillation, which selectively updates policies from stored planning distributions only when they offer better targets, reducing the influence of stale data without costly reanalysis. Across continuous-control benchmarks, GEM-MPC outperforms existing planning-based baselines while using lower computational budgets.

By Alvaro Serra-Gomez, Thomas Moerland