Escaping Path Mirages in Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning remains challenging in stochastic long-horizon settings, where compounding value estimation errors hinder reliable goal reaching. While prior methods have sought to address this challenge through various approaches, a key challenge remains path mirage, where agents overcommit to spuriously successful trajectories in offline datasets induced by stochasticity, often leading to failure on difficult tasks. To address this issue, we propose Branch-aware Graph Planning (BGP), which captures stochastic branching structures by identifying high-variability points as graph nodes and designing goal-conditioned edges with segmented learning to avoid unreliable branches and reduce unnecessary stochasticity along paths. As a result, BGP enables reliable goal reaching even in highly stochastic long-horizon environments, and experiments on diverse OGBench tasks show that it substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art offline goal-conditioned RL methods. Our implementation is available at https://umlic.github.io/papers/BGP/.