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Related papers: Off-Policy Reward Shaping with Ensembles

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Offline reinforcement learning learns policies from fixed datasets without further environment interaction. A key challenge in this setting is epistemic uncertainty, arising from limited or biased data coverage, particularly when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Abhilash Reddy Chenreddy , Erick Delage

We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Ben London , Levi Lu , Ted Sandler , Thorsten Joachims

Reinforcement learning (RL) has successfully automated the complex process of mining formulaic alpha factors, for creating interpretable and profitable investment strategies. However, existing methods are hampered by the sparse rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Junjie Zhao , Chengxi Zhang , Chenkai Wang , Peng Yang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Xiao Hu , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

This study focuses on the topic of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a variant of conventional reinforcement learning that dispenses with the need for online interaction or specification of reward functions. Instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yachen Kang , Diyuan Shi , Jinxin Liu , Li He , Donglin Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to learn optimal policies with access only to trajectories in a fixed dataset. Policy constraint methods formulate policy learning as an optimization problem that balances maximizing reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Padmanaba Srinivasan , William Knottenbelt

Ensemble learning is a very prevalent method employed in machine learning. The relative success of ensemble methods is attributed to their ability to tackle a wide range of instances and complex problems that require different low-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Rohan Saphal , Balaraman Ravindran , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Sasikanth Avancha , Bharat Kaul

We consider a model-based approach to perform batch off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Our method takes a mixture-of-experts approach to combine parametric and non-parametric models of the environment such that the final value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Scott Sussex , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

We provide a framework for accelerating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by heuristics constructed from domain knowledge or offline data. Tabula rasa RL algorithms require environment interactions or computation that scales with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ching-An Cheng , Andrey Kolobov , Adith Swaminathan

We propose a generic reward shaping approach for improving the rate of convergence in reinforcement learning (RL), called Self Improvement Based REwards, or SIBRE. The approach is designed for use in conjunction with any existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Somjit Nath , Richa Verma , Abhik Ray , Harshad Khadilkar

Shaping has proven to be a powerful but precarious means of improving reinforcement learning performance. Ng, Harada, and Russell (1999) proposed the potential-based shaping algorithm for adding shaping rewards in a way that guarantees the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-28 E. Wiewiora

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

We enable reinforcement learning agents to learn successful behavior policies by utilizing relevant pre-existing teacher policies. The teacher policies are introduced as objectives, in addition to the task objective, in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Shruti Mishra , Ankit Anand , Jordan Hoffmann , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Doina Precup

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is proven powerful for decision making in simulated environments. However, training deep RL model is challenging in real world applications such as production-scale health-care or recommender systems because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Ge Liu , Rui Wu , Heng-Tze Cheng , Jing Wang , Jayden Ooi , Lihong Li , Ang Li , Wai Lok Sibon Li , Craig Boutilier , Ed Chi

Offline reinforcement learning enables learning from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. The lack of environmental interactions makes the policy training vulnerable to state-action pairs far from the training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Shentao Yang , Zhendong Wang , Huangjie Zheng , Yihao Feng , Mingyuan Zhou

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Arip Asadulaev , Maksim Bobrin , Salem Lahlou , Dmitry Dylov , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac

One of the key challenges in applying reinforcement learning to real-life problems is that the amount of train-and-error required to learn a good policy increases drastically as the task becomes complex. One potential solution to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-29 Kazeto Yamamoto , Takashi Onishi , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

This paper proposes a policy-based deep reinforcement learning hyper-heuristic framework for solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem. The hyper-heuristic agent learns to switch scheduling rules based on the system state dynamically. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Sofiene Lassoued , Asrat Gobachew , Stefan Lier , Andreas Schwung

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa
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