Improving Online Reinforcement Learning via Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation

Abstract

Online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms frequently exhibit poor sample efficiency and unstable learning dynamics, stemming from systematic critic estimation errors that are exacerbated by greedy policy updates. Existing behavior-prior reinforcement learning methods attempt to alleviate this issue by relying on offline pre-training to learn behavior models from fixed datasets and using policy priors to constrain online policy updates. However, the limited quality of offline datasets often hinders the ability to provide high-value policies that can effectively guide policy updates. The absence of expert trajectories significantly impairs online policy learning, leading to low sample efficiency and suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we depart from conventional behavior prior approaches and propose a Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation (B2PD) algorithm. B2PD leverages action-value priors to guide a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) in generating a high-value behavior support set. The resulting expert behavior priors are further distilled into the agent, effectively reducing inefficient exploration and enabling stable policy optimization, while establishing a bidirectional knowledge flow mechanism. Empirical evaluations on both state- and pixel-based tasks verify that B2PD substantially improves sample efficiency while maintaining stable policy optimization. More broadly, this work shows that enforcing high-quality behavioral support during online learning effectively mitigates critic-induced error amplification, enabling structured behavior priors to guide policy updates in a principled and sample-efficient manner.