Model Risk-sensitive Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming critical in risk-sensitive areas such as finance and autonomous driving, where incorrect decisions can lead to substantial financial loss or compromised safety. However, traditional risksensitive offline RL methods often struggle with accurately assessing risk, with minor errors in the estimated return potentially causing significant inaccuracies of risk estimation. These challenges are intensified by distribution shifts inherent in offline RL. To mitigate these issues, we propose a model risk-sensitive offline RL framework designed to minimize the worst-case of risks across a set of plausible alternative scenarios rather than solely focusing on minimizing estimated risk. We present a critic-ensemble criterion method that identifies the plausible alternative scenarios without introducing additional hyperparameters. We also incorporate the learned Fourier feature framework and the IQN framework to address spectral bias in neural networks, which can otherwise lead to severe errors in calculating model risk. Our experiments in finance and self-driving scenarios demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces risk, by 11.2% to 18.5%, compared to the most outperforming risk-sensitive offline RL baseline, particularly in highly uncertain environments.

• Corresponding Author 1 Whenever the context is clear, we will refer to aleatoric risk as risk.