Prompting Decision Transformers for Zero-Shot Reach-Avoid Policies

Abstract

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning methods have shown promise for reach-avoid tasks, where an agent must reach a target state while avoiding undesirable regions of the state space. Existing approaches typically encode avoid-region information into an augmented state space and cost function, which prevents flexible, dynamic specification of novel avoid-region information at evaluation time. They also rely heavily on well-designed reward and cost functions, limiting scalability to complex or poorly structured environments. We introduce RADT, a decision transformer model for offline, reward-free, goal-conditioned, avoid region-conditioned RL. RADT encodes goals and avoid regions directly as prompt tokens, allowing any number of avoid regions of arbitrary size to be specified at evaluation time. Using only suboptimal offline trajectories from a random policy, RADT learns reach-avoid behavior through a novel combination of goal and avoid-region hindsight relabeling. We benchmark RADT against 3 existing offline goal-conditioned RL models across 11 tasks, environments, and experimental settings. RADT generalizes in a zero-shot manner to out-of-distribution avoid region sizes and counts, outperforming baselines that require retraining. In one such zero-shot setting, RADT achieves 35.7% improvement in normalized cost over the best retrained baseline while maintaining high goal-reaching success. We apply RADT to cell reprogramming in biology, where it reduces visits to undesirable intermediate gene expression states during trajectories to desired target states, despite stochastic transitions and discrete, structured state dynamics.