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Related papers: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: Counterfactually-Guided P…

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Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

Learning from Observations (LfO) is a practical reinforcement learning scenario from which many applications can benefit through the reuse of incomplete resources. Compared to conventional imitation learning (IL), LfO is more challenging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Andrew Y. Ng , Michael I. Jordan

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Lucas Lehnert , Doina Precup

Off-policy learning in dynamic decision problems is essential for providing strong evidence that a new policy is better than the one in use. But how can we prove superiority without testing the new policy? To answer this question, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-12 Assaf Hallak , François Schnitzler , Timothy Mann , Shie Mannor

We study the offline reinforcement learning (RL) in the face of unmeasured confounders. Due to the lack of online interaction with the environment, offline RL is facing the following two significant challenges: (i) the agent may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zuyue Fu , Zhengling Qi , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Yanxun Xu , Michael R. Kosorok

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

Machine-learning models are increasingly driving decisions in high-stakes settings, such as finance, law, and hiring, thus, highlighting the need for transparency. However, the key challenge is to balance transparency -- clarifying `why' a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Sopam Dasgupta , Sadaf MD Halim , Joaquín Arias , Elmer Salazar , Gopal Gupta

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems. They rely on fresh on-policy data, making them sample-inefficient and requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Alessandro Montenegro , Federico Mansutti , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

Counterfactual learning has become promising for understanding and modeling causality in complex and dynamic systems. This paper presents a novel method for counterfactual learning in the context of multivariate time series analysis and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gianlucca Zuin , Adriano Veloso

We develop a new continual meta-learning method to address challenges in sequential multi-task learning. In this setting, the agent's goal is to achieve high reward over any sequence of tasks quickly. Prior meta-reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Glen Berseth , Zhiwei Zhang , Grace Zhang , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

When applied in healthcare, reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to dynamically match the right interventions to subjects to maximize population benefit. However, the learned policy may disproportionately allocate efficacious actions to one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-15 Jitao Wang , Chengchun Shi , John D. Piette , Joshua R. Loftus , Donglin Zeng , Zhenke Wu

Counterfactual explanations provide ways of achieving a favorable model outcome with minimum input perturbation. However, counterfactual explanations can also be leveraged to reconstruct the model by strategically training a surrogate model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Pasan Dissanayake , Sanghamitra Dutta

Large language model (LLM) deployments increasingly rely on multi-agent architectures in which multiple models either compete through routing mechanisms or collaborate to produce a final answer. In both settings, the learning signal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Stela Tong , Elai Ben-Gal

Zero-shot reinforcement learning is necessary for extracting optimal policies in absence of concrete rewards for fast adaptation to future problem settings. Forward-backward representations (FB) have emerged as a promising method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Núria Armengol Urpí , Marin Vlastelica , Georg Martius , Stelian Coros

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

Interactive recommendation is able to learn from the interactive processes between users and systems to confront the dynamic interests of users. Recent advances have convinced that the ability of reinforcement learning to handle the dynamic…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-04 Siyu Wang , Xiaocong Chen , Lina Yao

Federated learning (FL) is a promising technology for data privacy and distributed optimization, but it suffers from data imbalance and heterogeneity among clients. Existing FL methods try to solve the problems by aligning client with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Zhonghua Jiang , Jimin Xu , Shengyu Zhang , Tao Shen , Jiwei Li , Kun Kuang , Haibin Cai , Fei Wu