Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Flow-Based Task Inference and Adaptive Correction of Feature Overgeneralization

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07164v1
• Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:16:07 GMT
• Title: Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Flow-Based Task Inference and Adaptive Correction of Feature Overgeneralization
• Authors: Min Wang, Xin Li, Mingzhong Wang, Hasnaa Bennis,
• Abstract summary: offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) combines the strengths of learning from diverse datasets in offline RL with the adaptability to new tasks of meta-RL.<n>Existing research indicates that the generalization of the $Q$ network affects the extrapolation error in offline RL.<n>We propose FLORA, which identifies OOD samples by modeling feature distributions and estimating their uncertainties.
• Score: 12.107082786676907
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) combines the strengths of learning from diverse datasets in offline RL with the adaptability to new tasks of meta-RL, promising safe and efficient knowledge acquisition by RL agents. However, OMRL still suffers extrapolation errors due to out-of-distribution (OOD) actions, compromised by broad task distributions and Markov Decision Process (MDP) ambiguity in meta-RL setups. Existing research indicates that the generalization of the $Q$ network affects the extrapolation error in offline RL. This paper investigates this relationship by decomposing the $Q$ value into feature and weight components, observing that while decomposition enhances adaptability and convergence in the case of high-quality data, it often leads to policy degeneration or collapse in complex tasks. We observe that decomposed $Q$ values introduce a large estimation bias when the feature encounters OOD samples, a phenomenon we term ''feature overgeneralization''. To address this issue, we propose FLORA, which identifies OOD samples by modeling feature distributions and estimating their uncertainties. FLORA integrates a return feedback mechanism to adaptively adjust feature components. Furthermore, to learn precise task representations, FLORA explicitly models the complex task distribution using a chain of invertible transformations. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that FLORA achieves rapid adaptation and meta-policy improvement compared to baselines across various environments.

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