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When the underlying probability distribution in a stochastic optimization is observed only through data, various data-driven formulations have been studied to obtain approximate optimal solutions. We show that no such formulations can, in a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-31 Henry Lam

Model-based offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) constructs environment models from offline datasets to perform conservative policy optimization. Existing approaches focus on learning state transitions through ensemble models, rollouting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Hongye Cao , Fan Feng , Jing Huo , Shangdong Yang , Meng Fang , Tianpei Yang , Yang Gao

We consider a challenging theoretical problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL): obtaining sample-efficiency guarantees with a dataset lacking sufficient coverage, under only realizability-type assumptions for the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction for learning policies from pre-collected datasets without requiring further interactions with the environment. However, existing methods struggle to handle out-of-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Zhepeng Cen , Zuxin Liu , Zitong Wang , Yihang Yao , Henry Lam , Ding Zhao

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alex X. Lee , Anusha Nagabandi , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE), a central and fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL), in the challenging setting of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with large observation spaces. Recent works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

Due to recent breakthroughs, reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in challenging sequential decision-making problems. However, an open question is how to make RL cope with partial observability which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-23 Stephan Weigand , Pascal Klink , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Modern decision-making systems, from robots to web recommendation engines, are expected to adapt: to user preferences, changing circumstances or even new tasks. Yet, it is still uncommon to deploy a dynamically learning agent (rather than a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shengpu Tang , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Dipendra Misra , Alex Lamb , John Langford , Paul Mineiro , Sebastian Kochman

Sample efficiency and exploration remain major challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL). A powerful approach that can be applied to address these issues is the inclusion of offline data, such as prior trajectories from a human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Philip J. Ball , Laura Smith , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

We study the fundamental tradeoffs between computational tractability and statistical accuracy for a general family of hypothesis testing problems with combinatorial structures. Based upon an oracle model of computation, which captures the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-31 Zhaoran Wang , Quanquan Gu , Han Liu

Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Bohan Zhang , Michael Chen , A. Pavan , N. V. Vinodchandran , Lin F. Yang , Ruosong Wang

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) for reachability specifications is fundamental in sequential decision-making, yet theoretical guarantees remain less explored. A recent work achieves asymptotic convergence to optimal policies. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Amogh Palasamudram , Jakub Svoboda , Suguman Bansal , Krishnendu Chatterjee

Sample efficiency is critical when applying learning-based methods to robotic manipulation due to the high cost of collecting expert demonstrations and the challenges of on-robot policy learning through online Reinforcement Learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Arsh Tangri , Ondrej Biza , Dian Wang , David Klee , Owen Howell , Robert Platt

One of the goals of natural language understanding is to develop models that map sentences into meaning representations. However, training such models requires expensive annotation of complex structures, which hinders their adoption.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Omri Koshorek , Gabriel Stanovsky , Yichu Zhou , Vivek Srikumar , Jonathan Berant

Observational learning requires an agent to learn to perform a task by referencing only observations of the performed task. This work investigates the equivalent setting in real-world robot learning where access to hand-designed rewards and…

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

We study finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation for both policy evaluation and policy optimization. Prior work established that statistically efficient learning is impossible for either of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Volodymyr Tkachuk , Csaba Szepesvári , Xiaoqi Tan

Learning to act from observational data without active environmental interaction is a well-known challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Recent approaches involve constraints on the learned policy or conservative updates, preventing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Georg Ostrovski , Pablo Samuel Castro , Will Dabney

Accelerated gradient methods have had significant impact in machine learning -- in particular the theoretical side of machine learning -- due to their ability to achieve oracle lower bounds. But their heuristic construction has hindered…

Computation · Statistics 2018-02-16 Michael Betancourt , Michael I. Jordan , Ashia C. Wilson