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Related papers: Safe and Efficient Off-Policy Reinforcement Learni…

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Off-policy learning is key to scaling up reinforcement learning as it allows to learn about a target policy from the experience generated by a different behavior policy. Unfortunately, it has been challenging to combine off-policy learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Ahmed Touati , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Pascal Vincent

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

A great variety of off-policy learning algorithms exist in the literature, and new breakthroughs in this area continue to be made, improving theoretical understanding and yielding state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

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

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

Sample efficiency is one of the most critical issues for online reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods achieve higher sample efficiency by adopting model-based methods, Q-ensemble, or better exploration mechanisms. We, instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jiafei Lyu , Le Wan , Zongqing Lu , Xiu Li

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but counteracting off-policy bias without exacerbating variance is challenging. Classically, off-policy bias is corrected in a per-decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Brett Daley , Martha White , Christopher Amato , Marlos C. Machado

Learning from off-policy data is essential for sample-efficient reinforcement learning. In the present work, we build on the insight that the advantage function can be understood as the causal effect of an action on the return, and show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Hsiao-Ru Pan , Bernhard Schölkopf

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Recurrent off-policy deep reinforcement learning models achieve state-of-the-art performance but are often sidelined due to their high computational demands. In response, we introduce RISE (Recurrent Integration via Simplified Encodings), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Tyler Clark , Christine Evers , Jonathon Hare

Replaying data is a principal mechanism underlying the stability and data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). We present an effective yet simple framework to extend the use of replays across multiple experiments, minimally…

We study high-confidence behavior-agnostic off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate a confidence interval on a target policy's value, given only access to a static experience dataset collected by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Bo Dai , Ofir Nachum , Yinlam Chow , Lihong Li , Csaba Szepesvári , Dale Schuurmans

The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) faces challenges with sample inefficiency because of its reliance on sufficient on-policy data to evaluate the performance of the current policy during reward function updates. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Yilei Chen , Vittorio Giammarino , James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Dongdong Li , Jiuxiang Dong

Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

Modern deep reinforcement learning methods have departed from the incremental learning required for eligibility traces, rendering the implementation of the $\lambda$-return difficult in this context. In particular, off-policy methods that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Brett Daley , Christopher Amato