Pessimistic Model-based Offline RL: PAC Bounds and Posterior Sampling under Partial Coverage

We study model-based offline Reinforcement Learning with general function approximation. We present an algorithm named Constrained Pessimistic Policy Optimization (CPPO) which leverages a general function class and uses a constraint to encode pessimism. Under the assumption that the ground truth model belongs to our function class, CPPO can learn with the offline data only providing partial coverage, i.e., it can learn a policy that completes against any policy that is covered by the offline data, in polynomial sample complexity with respect to the statistical complexity of the function class. We then demonstrate that this algorithmic framework can be applied to many specialized Markov Decision Processes where the additional structural assumptions can further refine the concept of partial coverage. One notable example is low-rank MDP with representation learning where the partial coverage is defined using the concept of relative condition number measured by the underlying unknown ground truth feature representation. Finally, we introduce and study the Bayesian setting in offline RL. The key benefit of Bayesian offline RL is that algorithmically, we do not need to explicitly construct pessimism or reward penalty which could be hard beyond models with linear structures. We present a posterior sampling-based incremental policy optimization algorithm (PS-PO) which proceeds by iteratively sampling a model from the posterior distribution and performing one-step incremental policy optimization inside the sampled model. Theoretically, in expectation with respect to the prior distribution, PS-PO can learn a near optimal policy under partial coverage with polynomial sample complexity.