“Q-Transformer: Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functions”, Yevgen Chebotar, Quan Vuong, Alex Irpan, Karol Hausman, Fei Xia, Yao Lu, Aviral Kumar, Tianhe Yu, Alexander Herzog, Karl Pertsch, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Julian Ibarz, Ofir Nachum, Sumedh Sontakke, Grecia Salazar, Huong T. Tran, Jodilyn Peralta, Clayton Tan, Deeksha Manjunath, Jaspiar Singht, Brianna Zitkovich, Tomas Jackson, Kanishka Rao, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine2023-09-18 (Transformer, offline RL, robotics)⁠:

In this work, we present a scalable reinforcement learning method for training multi-task policies from large offline datasets that can leverage both human demonstrations and autonomously collected data.

Our method uses a Transformer to provide a scalable representation for Q-functions trained via offline temporal difference backups. We therefore refer to the method as Q-Transformer.

By discretizing each action dimension and representing the Q-value of each action dimension as separate tokens, we can apply effective high-capacity sequence modeling techniques for Q-learning. [cf. Decision Transformer]

We present several design decisions that enable good performance with offline RL training, and show that Q-Transformer outperforms prior offline RL algorithms and imitation learning techniques on a large diverse real-world robotic manipulation task suite.

The project’s website and videos can be found at https://qtransformer.github.io/.