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In model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, using noisy value estimates to supervise policy evaluation and optimization is detrimental to the sample efficiency. As this noise is heteroscedastic, its effects can be mitigated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Vincent Mai , Kaustubh Mani , Liam Paull

In this paper, we provide finite-sample convergence guarantees for an off-policy variant of the natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithm based on Importance Sampling. In particular, we show that the algorithm converges to a global optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sajad Khodadadian , Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

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

Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Sarthak Ahuja , Mohammad Kachuee , Fateme Sheikholeslami , Weiqing Liu , Jaeyoung Do

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Post-training with reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong promise for advancing multimodal agents beyond supervised imitation. However, RL remains limited by poor data efficiency, particularly in settings where interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Chengxuan Lu , Zhenquan Zhang , Shukuan Wang , Qunzhi Lin , Baigui Sun , Yang Liu

Reinforcement learning, including reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), has emerged as a powerful approach for LLM post-training. Central to these approaches is the design of the importance sampling (IS) ratio used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yuheng Zhang , Chenlu Ye , Shuowei Jin , Changlong Yu , Wei Xiong , Saurabh Sahu , Nan Jiang

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of an evaluation policy, $\pi_e$, using a fixed dataset, $\mathcal{D}$, collected by one or more policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna

This paper proposes an off-policy risk-sensitive reinforcement learning based control framework for stabilization of a continuous-time nonlinear system that subjects to additive disturbances, input saturation, and state constraints. By…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-21 Cong Li , Qingchen Liu , Zhehua Zhou , Martin Buss , Fangzhou Liu

Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Francesco Faccio , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of significant research interest, and safe RL in particular is attracting attention due to its ability to handle safety-driven constraints that are crucial for real-world applications of RL algorithms.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-13 Song Bo , Xunyuan Yin , Jinfeng Liu

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

Off-policy evaluation learns a target policy's value with a historical dataset generated by a different behavior policy. In addition to a point estimate, many applications would benefit significantly from having a confidence interval (CI)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-09 Chengchun Shi , Runzhe Wan , Victor Chernozhukov , Rui Song

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) requires the collection of interventional data, which is sometimes expensive and even unethical in the real world, such as in the autonomous driving and the medical field. Offline reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Wenxuan Zhu , Chao Yu , Qiang Zhang

Offline zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn agents that optimize unseen reward functions without additional environment interaction. The standard approach to this problem trains task-conditioned policies by sampling task…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Nazim Bendib , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Olivier Sigaud

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Baturay Saglam , Furkan B. Mutlu , Dogan C. Cicek , Suleyman S. Kozat

While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-02 Erfaun Noorani , Christos Mavridis , John Baras

Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Chi Zhang , Sanmukh Rao Kuppannagari , Viktor K Prasanna

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an agent from pre-collected datasets, avoiding unsafe and inefficient real-time interaction. However, inevitable access to out-ofdistribution actions during the learning process introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Fan Zhang , Baoru Huang , Xin Zhang