Improved Context-Based Offline Meta-RL with Attention and Contrastive Learning.

Meta-learning for offline reinforcement learning (OMRL) is an understudied problem with tremendous potential impact by enabling RL algorithms in many real-world applications. A popular solution to the problem is to infer task identity as augmented state using a context-based encoder, for which efficient learning of task representations remains an open challenge. In this work, we improve upon one of the SOTA OMRL algorithms, FOCAL, by incorporating intra-task attention mechanism and inter-task contrastive learning objectives for more effective task inference and learning of control. Theoretical analysis and experiments are presented to demonstrate the superior performance, efficiency and robustness of our end-to-end and model free method compared to prior algorithms across multiple meta-RL benchmarks.