Reinforcement Learning as One Big Sequence Modeling Problem
Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating
single-step policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to
factorize the problem in time. However, we can also view RL as a sequence
modeling problem, with the goal being to predict a sequence of actions that
leads to a sequence of high rewards. Viewed in this way, it is tempting to
consider whether powerful, high-capacity sequence prediction models that work
well in other domains, such as natural-language processing, can also provide
simple and effective solutions to the RL problem. To this end, we explore how
RL can be reframed as "one big sequence modeling" problem, using
state-of-the-art Transformer architectures to model distributions over
sequences of states, actions, and rewards. Addressing RL as a sequence modeling
problem significantly simplifies a range of design decisions: we no longer
require separate behavior policy constraints, as is common in prior work on
offline model-free RL, and we no longer require ensembles or other epistemic
uncertainty estimators, as is common in prior work on model-based RL. All of
these roles are filled by the same Transformer sequence model. In our
experiments, we demonstrate the flexibility of this approach across
long-horizon dynamics prediction, imitation learning, goal-conditioned RL, and
offline RL.