# Representation Matters: Offline Pretraining for Sequential Decision Making

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.05815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 91 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Offline RL algorithms, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- Builds on 35 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2021.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Offline RL algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/offline-rl-algorithms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01643/) (2020)
- [Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04779/) (2020)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07219/) (2020)
- [Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02900/) (2018)
- [Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05905/) (2018)
- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (2017)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [Stabilizing Off-Policy Q-Learning via Bootstrapping Error Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00949/) (2019)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [Behavior Regularized Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11361/) (2019)
- [MOPO: Model-based Offline Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13239/) (2020)
- [Learning Invariant Representations for Reinforcement Learning without Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10742/) (2020)
- [Challenges of Real-World Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12901/) (2019)
- [Way Off-Policy Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning of Implicit Human Preferences in Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00456/) (2019)
- [Embed to Control: A Locally Linear Latent Dynamics Model for Control from Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.07365/) (2015)
- [Decoupling Representation Learning from Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08319/) (2020)
- [DeepMDP: Learning Continuous Latent Space Models for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02736/) (2019)
- [OPAL: Offline Primitive Discovery for Accelerating Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13611/) (2020)
- [Imagination-Augmented Agents for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06203/) (2017)
- [Parrot: Data-Driven Behavioral Priors for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10024/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05265/) (2021)
- [Deployment-Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Model-Based Offline Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03647/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 91)

- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [Multi-Game Decision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15241/) (2022)
- [Foundation Models for Decision Making: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04129/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning for Online and Offline RL in Low-rank MDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04652/) (2021)
- [Generalized Decision Transformer for Offline Hindsight Information Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10364/) (2021)
- [Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04799/) (2021)
- [Policy Expansion for Bridging Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00935/) (2023)
- [Is Value Learning Really the Main Bottleneck in Offline RL?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09329/) (2024)
- [Pre-Training for Robots: Offline RL Enables Learning New Tasks from a Handful of Trials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05178/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Model-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09328/) (2022)
- [Conservative Data Sharing for Multi-Task Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08128/) (2021)
- [How to Leverage Unlabeled Data in Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01741/) (2022)
- [VRL3: A Data-Driven Framework for Visual Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10324/) (2022)
- [Corruption-Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06630/) (2021)
- [SMART: Self-supervised Multi-task pretrAining with contRol Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09816/) (2023)
- [Masked Trajectory Models for Prediction, Representation, and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02968/) (2023)
- [Spectral Decomposition Representation for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09515/) (2022)
- [On Transforming Reinforcement Learning by Transformer: The Development Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14164/) (2022)
- [Provable Representation Learning for Imitation with Contrastive Fourier Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12272/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Behavior Cloning Regularization for Stable Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13846/) (2022)
- [Why Should I Trust You, Bellman? The Bellman Error is a Poor Replacement for Value Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12417/) (2022)
- [Inverse Dynamics Pretraining Learns Good Representations for Multitask Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16985/) (2023)
- [Chain of Thought Imitation with Procedure Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10816/) (2022)
- [Contrastive UCB: Provably Efficient Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning in Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14800/) (2022)
- [Policy Pre-training for Autonomous Driving via Self-supervised Geometric Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01006/) (2023)
- [Future-conditioned Unsupervised Pretraining for Decision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16683/) (2023)
- [Investigating the Properties of Neural Network Representations in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15955/) (2022)
- [PACT: Perception-Action Causal Transformer for Autoregressive Robotics Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11133/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Physics Informed Reinforcement Learning: Review and Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01909/) (2023)
- [Law Informs Code: A Legal Informatics Approach to Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13020/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent success of supervised learning methods on ever larger offline datasets has spurred interest in the reinforcement learning (RL) field to investigate whether the same paradigms can be translated to RL algorithms. This research area, known as offline RL, has largely focused on offline policy optimization, aiming to find a return-maximizing policy exclusively from offline data. In this paper, we consider a slightly different approach to incorporating offline data into sequential decision-making. We aim to answer the question, what unsupervised objectives applied to offline datasets are able to learn state representations which elevate performance on downstream tasks, whether those downstream tasks be online RL, imitation learning from expert demonstrations, or even offline policy optimization based on the same offline dataset? Through a variety of experiments utilizing standard offline RL datasets, we find that the use of pretraining with unsupervised learning objectives can dramatically improve the performance of policy learning algorithms that otherwise yield mediocre performance on their own. Extensive ablations further provide insights into what components of these unsupervised objectives -- e.g., reward prediction, continuous or discrete representations, pretraining or finetuning -- are most important and in which settings.