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Reinforcement learning has emerged as one of the prominent topics attracting attention in modern statistical learning, with policy evaluation being a key component. Unlike the traditional machine learning literature on this topic, our work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-04 Weidong Liu , Jiyuan Tu , Xi Chen , Yichen Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna

Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Lin F. Yang

In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alex Irpan , Kanishka Rao , Konstantinos Bousmalis , Chris Harris , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-02 Yuhan Li , Eugene Han , Yifan Hu , Wenzhuo Zhou , Zhengling Qi , Yifan Cui , Ruoqing Zhu

Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 John Schulman , Philipp Moritz , Sergey Levine , Michael Jordan , Pieter Abbeel

For an autonomous agent, executing a poor policy may be costly or even dangerous. For such agents, it is desirable to determine confidence interval lower bounds on the performance of any given policy without executing said policy. Current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Josiah P. Hanna , Peter Stone , Scott Niekum

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

This paper studies convergence rates for some value function approximations that arise in a collection of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) $H(\Omega)$. By casting an optimal control problem in a specific class of native spaces,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-20 Ali Bouland , Shengyuan Niu , Sai Tej Paruchuri , Andrew Kurdila , John Burns , Eugenio Schuster

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy needs to be learned from a single pre-collected dataset. Typically, policies are thus regularized during training to behave similarly to the data generating policy, by adding a penalty based on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Daniel Hein , Thomas Runkler

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

We examine the problem of determining demonstration sufficiency: how can a robot self-assess whether it has received enough demonstrations from an expert to ensure a desired level of performance? To address this problem, we propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Tu Trinh , Haoyu Chen , Daniel S. Brown

Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Reda Ouhamma , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Philippe Preux

In this paper, we investigate the sample complexity of policy evaluation in infinite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (also known as the off-policy evaluation problem) with linear function approximation. We identify a hard regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Lin Chen , Bruno Scherrer , Peter L. Bartlett

We consider the off-policy evaluation problem of reinforcement learning using deep convolutional neural networks. We analyze the deep fitted Q-evaluation method for estimating the expected cumulative reward of a target policy, when the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Xiang Ji , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang , Tuo Zhao

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

Many reinforcement learning applications involve the use of data that is sensitive, such as medical records of patients or financial information. However, most current reinforcement learning methods can leak information contained within the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-04 Tengyang Xie , Philip S. Thomas , Gerome Miklau

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Nathan Kallus , Angela Zhou

A common technique in reinforcement learning is to evaluate the value function from Monte Carlo simulations of a given policy, and use the estimated value function to obtain a new policy which is greedy with respect to the estimated value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Anna Winnicki , R. Srikant