# Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Task Offline Pretraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03360 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03360/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Latent dynamics models and model-based RL, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 33 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- World models / [Latent dynamics models and model-based RL](https://mlsanity.com/wm/latent-dynamics-models-and-model-based-rl/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01345/) (2021)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02900/) (2018)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00374/) (2019)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14990/) (2020)
- [Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05960/) (2020)
- [Improving Sample Efficiency in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01741/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Representation Learning from Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08319/) (2020)
- [Mastering Atari Games with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00210/) (2021)
- [Visual Foresight: Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00568/) (2018)
- [DeepMDP: Learning Continuous Latent Space Models for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02736/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08226/) (2019)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Pre-Training from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13880/) (2022)
- [Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04799/) (2021)
- [Representation Matters: Offline Pretraining for Sequential Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05815/) (2021)
- [Iso-Dream: Isolating and Leveraging Noncontrollable Visual Dynamics in World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13817/) (2022)
- [Visual Reinforcement Learning with Self-Supervised 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07241/) (2022)
- [SMART: Self-supervised Multi-task pretrAining with contRol Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09816/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Flow: Improve Upon Your Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05878/) (2019)
- [Learning Actionable Representations from Visual Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00928/) (2018)
- [Future-conditioned Unsupervised Pretraining for Decision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16683/) (2023)
- [On the Feasibility of Cross-Task Transfer with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10763/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pretraining reinforcement learning (RL) models on offline datasets is a promising way to improve their training efficiency in online tasks, but challenging due to the inherent mismatch in dynamics and behaviors across various tasks. We present a model-based RL method that learns to transfer potentially useful dynamics and action demonstrations from offline data to a novel task. The main idea is to use the world models not only as simulators for behavior learning but also as tools to measure the task relevance for both dynamics representation transfer and policy transfer. We build a time-varying, domain-selective distillation loss to generate a set of offline-to-online similarity weights. These weights serve two purposes: (i) adaptively transferring the task-agnostic knowledge of physical dynamics to facilitate world model training, and (ii) learning to replay relevant source actions to guide the target policy. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods in Meta-World and DeepMind Control Suite.
