mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Uncertainty-Aware Robotic World Model Makes Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Work on Real Robots

arXiv 2504.16680 ↗First posted 23 Apr 2025cs.RO cs.AI cs.LGcited by 15

On the map: World models → Latent dynamics models and model-based RL

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Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive results in robotics, yet high-performing pipelines remain highly task-specific, with little reuse of prior data. Offline Model-based RL (MBRL) offers greater data efficiency by training policies entirely from existing datasets, but suffers from compounding errors and distribution shift in long-horizon rollouts. Although existing methods have shown success in controlled simulation benchmarks, robustly applying them to the noisy, biased, and partially observed datasets typical of real-world robotics remains challenging. We present a principled pipeline for making offline MBRL effective on physical robots. Our RWM-U extends autoregressive world models with epistemic uncertainty estimation, enabling temporally consistent multi-step rollouts with uncertainty effectively propagated over long horizons. We combine RWM-U with MOPO-PPO, which adapts uncertainty-penalized policy optimization to the stable, on-policy PPO framework for real-world control. We evaluate our approach on diverse manipulation and locomotion tasks in simulation and on real quadruped and humanoid, training policies entirely from offline datasets. The resulting policies consistently outperform model-free and uncertainty-unaware model-based baselines, and fusing real-world data in model learning further yields robust policies that surpass online model-free baselines trained solely in simulation.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Latent dynamics models and model-based RL, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 31 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2025.

Builds on

31 of 41 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Robotic World Model: A Neural Network Simulator for Robust Policy Optimization in Robotics17 Jan
  2. 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models10 Jan
  3. 2022A Walk in the Park: Learning to Walk in 20 Minutes With Model-Free Reinforcement Learning16 Aug
  4. 2020Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models5 Oct
  5. 2019Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination3 Dec
  6. 2019When to Trust Your Model: Model-Based Policy Optimization19 Jun
  7. 2018Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models30 May

Other references · 24

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  2. 2018Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actorcited by 4,635
  3. 2016Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensemblescited by 3,888
  4. 2020Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problemscited by 1,873
  5. 2020Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,777
  6. 2020D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,406
  7. 2019Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shiftcited by 1,274
  8. 2021Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learningcited by 1,245
  9. 2018Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Explorationcited by 1,227
  10. 2018Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixelscited by 1,221
  11. 2019Stabilizing Off-Policy Q-Learning via Bootstrapping Error Reductioncited by 833
  12. 2019Behavior Regularized Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 654
12 more
  1. 2020MOPO: Model-based Offline Policy Optimizationcited by 630
  2. 2019Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Ataricited by 495
  3. 2018Accurate Uncertainties for Deep Learning Using Calibrated Regressioncited by 417
  4. 2021COMBO: Conservative Offline Model-Based Policy Optimizationcited by 365
  5. 2022A Survey on Offline Reinforcement Learning: Taxonomy, Review, and Open Problemscited by 228
  6. 2018Visual Foresight: Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Controlcited by 220
  7. 2018Model-Based Reinforcement Learning via Meta-Policy Optimizationcited by 99
  8. 2019Data Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Legged Robotscited by 60
  9. 2019An Optimistic Perspective on Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 37
  10. 2022Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning with Pessimism-Modulated Dynamics Beliefcited by 22
  11. 2024Learning to Walk from Three Minutes of Real-World Data with Semi-structured Dynamics Modelscited by 14
  12. 2024SUMO: Search-Based Uncertainty Estimation for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 12

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Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 12.

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  1. 2023Finetuning Offline World Models in the Real World
  2. 2025Accelerating Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with State-Space World Models
  3. 2024MOTO: Offline Pre-training to Online Fine-tuning for Model-based Robot Learning
  4. 2021A Workflow for Offline Model-Free Robotic Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2025Policy-Driven World Model Adaptation for Robust Offline Model-based Reinforcement Learning
  6. 2022Real World Offline Reinforcement Learning with Realistic Data Source
  7. 2023H2O+: An Improved Framework for Hybrid Offline-and-Online RL with Dynamics Gaps
  8. 2026Beyond Static Datasets: Robust Offline Policy Optimization via Vetted Synthetic Transitions