From Static Policies to Adaptive Priors in Offline Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2609.35880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has traditionally focused on learning policies for direct deployment under conservative objectives, where uncertainty outside the offline dataset is treated pessimistically to ensure robustness. We argue that this formulation becomes incomplete when an offline-trained policy is subsequently updated through online interaction, as increasingly occurs in modern intelligent systems through test-time adaptation and online fine-tuning. This position paper argues that, in such settings, the objective of offline RL should extend beyond immediate deployment and instead prioritize learning adaptive policy priors: policies that preserve the capacity to improve during subsequent interaction through memory, exploration, and self-correction. We formalize this perspective as adaptive offline reinforcement learning (AORL), distinguish it from offline-to-online RL, and explain why adaptability becomes important under distributional shift, limited dataset coverage, and changing test-time conditions. We further discuss Bayesian offline RL as one principled direction for constructing adaptive policy priors by preserving epistemic uncertainty over plausible environments. Finally, we outline connections, open challenges, and research directions for treating offline RL as preparation for future experience rather than as a static deployment problem.

Abstract:Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has traditionally focused on learning policies for direct deployment under conservative objectives, where uncertainty outside the offline dataset is treated pessimistically to ensure robustness. We argue that this formulation becomes incomplete when an offline-trained policy is subsequently updated through online interaction, as increasingly occurs in modern intelligent systems through test-time adaptation and online fine-tuning. This position paper argues that, in such settings, the objective of offline RL should extend beyond immediate deployment and instead prioritize learning adaptive policy priors: policies that preserve the capacity to improve during subsequent interaction through memory, exploration, and self-correction. We formalize this perspective as adaptive offline reinforcement learning (AORL), distinguish it from offline-to-online RL, and explain why adaptability becomes important under distributional shift, limited dataset coverage, and changing test-time conditions. We further discuss Bayesian offline RL as one principled direction for constructing adaptive policy priors by preserving epistemic uncertainty over plausible environments. Finally, we outline connections, open challenges, and research directions for treating offline RL as preparation for future experience rather than as a static deployment problem.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.35880 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.35880v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35880 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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From Static Policies to Adaptive Priors in Offline Reinforcement Learning

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