Learning Off-Policy with Online Planning

We propose Learning Off-Policy with Online Planning (LOOP), combining the techniques from model-based and model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. The agent learns a model of the environment, and then uses trajectory optimization with the learned model to select actions. To sidestep the myopic effect of fixed horizon trajectory optimization, a value function is attached to the end of the planning horizon. This value function is learned through off-policy reinforcement learning, using trajectory optimization as its behavior policy. Furthermore, we introduce "actor-guided" trajectory optimization to mitigate the actor-divergence issue in the proposed method. We benchmark our methods on continuous control tasks and demonstrate that it offers a significant improvement over the underlying model-based and model-free algorithms.