Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning with Interactive Data Collection: Fundamental Hardness and Near-Optimal Algorithms

Understand

The sim-to-real gap, which represents the disparity between training and testing environments, poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL).

• A promising approach to addressing this challenge is distributionally robust RL, often framed as a robust Markov decision process (RMDP).
• In this framework, the objective is to find a robust policy that achieves good performance under the worst-case scenario among all environments within a pre-specified uncertainty set centered around the training environment.
• Unlike previous work, which relies on a generative model or a pre-collected offline dataset enjoying good coverage of the deployment environment, we tackle robust RL via interactive data collection, where the learner interacts with the training environment only and refines the policy through trial and error.