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Off-policy evaluation and learning in contextual bandits use logged interaction data to estimate and optimize the value of a target policy. Most existing methods require sufficient action overlap between the logging and target policies, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Shu Tamano

Experience replay is a core ingredient of modern deep reinforcement learning, yet its benefits in policy optimization are poorly understood beyond empirical heuristics. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for experience replay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

Offline post-training adapts a pretrained robot policy to a target dataset by supervised regression on recorded actions. In practice, robot datasets are heterogeneous: they mix embodiments, camera setups, and demonstrations of varying…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wanpeng Zhang , Hao Luo , Sipeng Zheng , Yicheng Feng , Haiweng Xu , Ziheng Xi , Chaoyi Xu , Haoqi Yuan , Zongqing Lu

An inherent problem of reinforcement learning is performing exploration of an environment through random actions, of which a large portion can be unproductive. Instead, exploration can be improved by initializing the learning policy with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Jun Jet Tai , Jordan K. Terry , Mauro S. Innocente , James Brusey , Nadjim Horri

Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Junyu Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Zheng Yu , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning seeks to train agents to reach specified goals from previously collected trajectories. Scaling that promises to long-horizon tasks remains challenging, notably due to compounding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Anthony Kobanda , Waris Radji , Mathieu Petitbois , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Rémy Portelas

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

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

This paper studies offline policy learning, which aims at utilizing observations collected a priori (from either fixed or adaptively evolving behavior policies) to learn an optimal individualized decision rule that achieves the best overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ying Jin , Zhimei Ren , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Policy evaluation with linear function approximation is an important problem in reinforcement learning. When facing high-dimensional feature spaces, such a problem becomes extremely hard considering the computation efficiency and quality of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Haifang Li , Yingce Xia , Wensheng Zhang

We present a novel off-policy loss function for learning a transition model in model-based reinforcement learning. Notably, our loss is derived from the off-policy policy evaluation objective with an emphasis on correcting distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Cameron Voloshin , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

The dynamic portfolio optimization problem in finance frequently requires learning policies that adhere to various constraints, driven by investor preferences and risk. We motivate this problem of finding an allocation policy within a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Nymisha Bandi , Theja Tulabandhula

We address the problem of offline learning a policy that avoids undesirable demonstrations. Unlike conventional offline imitation learning approaches that aim to imitate expert or near-optimal demonstrations, our setting involves avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Huy Hoang , Tien Mai , Pradeep Varakantham

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy learns to maximize cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. Towards conservative strategy, current methods choose to regularize the behavior policy or learn a lower bound of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Yuhang Jiang , Shuncheng He , Xiangyang Ji

Reinforcement learning (RL) has seen significant success across various domains, but its adoption is often limited by the black-box nature of neural network policies, making them difficult to interpret. In contrast, symbolic policies allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Sascha Marton , Tim Grams , Florian Vogt , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt , Heiner Stuckenschmidt

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

Many off-policy prediction learning algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, but it remains unclear which algorithms learn faster than others. We empirically compare 11 off-policy prediction learning algorithms with linear function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Sina Ghiassian , Richard S. Sutton

Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Jaron J. R. Lee , David Arbour , Georgios Theocharous