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Offline reinforcement learning is important in domains such as medicine, economics, and e-commerce where online experimentation is costly, dangerous or unethical, and where the true model is unknown. However, most methods assume all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-30 David Bruns-Smith , Angela Zhou

This paper proposes a data-driven method for learning convergent control policies from offline data using Contraction theory. Contraction theory enables constructing a policy that makes the closed-loop system trajectories inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-04 Navid Rezazadeh , Maxwell Kolarich , Solmaz S. Kia , Negar Mehr

We introduce off-policy distributional Q($\lambda$), a new addition to the family of off-policy distributional evaluation algorithms. Off-policy distributional Q($\lambda$) does not apply importance sampling for off-policy learning, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Yunhao Tang , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Bernardo Ávila Pires , Will Dabney

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guopeng Li , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Julian F. P. Kooij

A central challenge to applying many off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problems is the variance introduced by importance sampling. In off-policy learning, the agent learns about a different policy than the one being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Eric Graves , Sina Ghiassian

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

This paper aims to solve a safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with risk measure-based constraints. As risk measures, such as conditional value at risk (CVaR), focus on the tail distribution of cost signals, constraining risk measures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Dohyeong Kim , Songhwai Oh

There is a growing desire in the field of reinforcement learning (and machine learning in general) to move from black-box models toward more "interpretable AI." We improve interpretability of reinforcement learning by increasing the utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Aaron M. Roth , Nicholay Topin , Pooyan Jamshidi , Manuela Veloso

A temporally abstract action, or an option, is specified by a policy and a termination condition: the policy guides option behavior, and the termination condition roughly determines its length. Generally, learning with longer options (like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Anna Harutyunyan , Peter Vrancx , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Ann Nowe

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

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

While standard reinforcement learning optimizes a single reward signal, many applications require optimizing a nonlinear utility $f(J_1^\pi,\dots,J_M^\pi)$ over multiple objectives, where each $J_m^\pi$ denotes the expected discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

Finite-horizon lookahead policies are abundantly used in Reinforcement Learning and demonstrate impressive empirical success. Usually, the lookahead policies are implemented with specific planning methods such as Monte Carlo Tree Search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

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

Policy-based methods currently dominate reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines for large language model (LLM) reasoning, leaving value-based approaches largely unexplored. We revisit the classical paradigm of Bellman Residual Minimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Yurun Yuan , Fan Chen , Zeyu Jia , Alexander Rakhlin , Tengyang Xie

A popular paradigm for offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks is to first fit the offline trajectories to a sequence model, and then prompt the model for actions that lead to high expected return. In addition to obtaining accurate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Xuejie Liu , Anji Liu , Guy Van den Broeck , Yitao Liang

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Xiaoyang Tan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing