Pretraining a Shared Q-Network for Data-Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning

Jongchan Park, Mingyu Park, Donghwan Lee

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 Main Conference (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy from a fixed dataset without additional environment interaction. However, effective offline policy learning often requires a large and diverse dataset to mitigate epistemic uncertainty. Collecting such data demands substantial online interactions, which are costly or infeasible in many real-world domains. Therefore, improving policy learning from limited offline data—achieving high data efficiency—is critical for practical offline RL. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective plug-and-play pretraining framework that initializes the feature representation of a $Q$-network to enhance data efficiency in offline RL. Our approach employs a shared $Q$-network architecture trained in two stages: pretraining a backbone feature extractor with a transition prediction head; training a $Q$-network—combining the backbone feature extractor and a $Q$-value head—with *any* offline RL objective. Extensive experiments on the D4RL, Robomimic, V-D4RL, and ExoRL benchmarks show that our method substantially improves both performance and data efficiency across diverse datasets and domains. Remarkably, with only **10\%** of the dataset, our approach outperforms standard offline RL baselines trained on the full data.

10.52202/085713-4350