Generating Critic-Guided Synthetic Experience in Latent World Models

Jorge de Freitas, Christos Ziakas, Alessandra Russo

Learning from offline datasets is limited in scalability, as collecting new experience is often costly or unsafe in the real world. World models offer an alternative way to generate new experience through a learned dynamics model, yet learning policies in latent space is limited due to compounding errors in imagined rollouts. To this end, we propose using the world model as a local transition generator, leveraging critic guidance to choose actions inside that model to generate synthetic experiences. We study action refinement methodologies, introducing Critic-Guided Synthetic Experience (CGSE) generation in world models. Specifically, CGSE augments an existing offline dataset by sampling candidate actions using an offline policy and refining each to maximize a first-order approximation of the $Q$-function within a trust region. We then use a frozen latent world model to imagine the future state given each updated action, and use the critic to choose the best one, appending this synthetic transition to the replay buffer. Our method requires no additional real-environment interaction or test-time planner, as it generates synthetic experience offline using the world model. On three…