Behavior-Invariant Task Representation Learning with Transformer-based World Models for Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning
About
Offline meta-reinforcement learning leverages static datasets to enable agents to generalize to unseen environments by combining offline efficiency with meta-learning adaptability, yet it faces key challenges from context and policy distribution shifts. These issues hinder agents from adapting to online environments, and are further exacerbated under sparse-reward settings. As a result, agents often become trapped in an inherent pattern dilemma, failing to achieve robust generalization. In this work, we propose a novel framework that integrates information-theoretic task representation learning with a Transformer-based stochastic world model. Our approach extracts task-defining latent variables that are invariant to behavior policy, thereby effectively mitigating the context distribution shift. To further handle policy shift and model exploitation, we apply a conservative value penalty to imagination-based rollouts, preventing the policy from exploiting model inaccuracies while maintaining robust adaptation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, with superior stability and generalization under out-of-distribution and sparse-reward settings.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Hopper-Param (ID) | Average Return279 | 30 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Cheetah-Vel-Sparse (OOD) | Average Return296 | 15 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Cheetah-Vel ID | Average Return269 | 10 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Walker-Param (ID) | Average Return158 | 10 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Ant Dir | Average Return236 | 10 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Walker-Param | Average Return140 | 10 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Point-Robot Sparse | Average Return42 | 10 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Walker Param-Sparse | Average Return82 | 10 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Cheetah-Vel | Average Return60 | 10 | |
| Meta-Reinforcement Learning | Ant-Dir (ID) | Average Return269 | 5 |