Quantile Q-Learning: Revisiting Offline Extreme Q-Learning with Quantile Regression
About
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from fixed datasets without further environment interaction, making it particularly valuable in high-risk or costly domains. Extreme $Q$-Learning (XQL) is a recent offline RL method that models Bellman errors using the Extreme Value Theorem, yielding strong empirical performance. However, XQL and its stabilized variant MXQL suffer from notable limitations: both require extensive hyperparameter tuning specific to each dataset and domain, and also exhibit instability during training. To address these issues, we proposed a principled method to estimate the temperature coefficient $\beta$ via quantile regression under mild assumptions. To further improve training stability, we introduce a value regularization technique with mild generalization, inspired by recent advances in constrained value learning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves competitive or superior performance across a range of benchmark tasks, including D4RL and NeoRL2, while maintaining stable training dynamics and using a consistent set of hyperparameters across all datasets and domains.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Gym walker2d (medium-replay) | Normalized Return90.2 | 68 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Gym halfcheetah-medium | Normalized Return49.5 | 60 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Gym walker2d medium | Normalized Return85.2 | 58 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL antmaze-umaze (diverse) | Normalized Score81.3 | 47 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Gym hopper (medium-replay) | Normalized Return101.1 | 44 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Gym halfcheetah-medium-replay | Normalized Average Return46.6 | 43 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Gym hopper-medium | Normalized Return77.3 | 41 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Adroit pen (human) | Normalized Return128.3 | 39 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Adroit pen (cloned) | Normalized Return115.2 | 39 | |
| Offline Reinforcement Learning | D4RL Gym walker2d medium-expert | Normalized Average Return113.2 | 38 |