Related papers: Safe Policy Improvement with an Estimated Baseline…

This paper considers Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) in Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL): from a fixed dataset and without direct access to the true environment, train a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the…

Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) is an important technique for offline reinforcement learning in safety critical applications as it improves the behavior policy with a high probability. We classify various SPI approaches from the literature…

Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL) consists in training a policy using trajectories collected with another policy, called the behavioural policy. Safe policy improvement (SPI) provides guarantees with high probability that the trained…

In an offline reinforcement learning setting, the safe policy improvement (SPI) problem aims to improve the performance of a behavior policy according to which sample data has been generated. State-of-the-art approaches to SPI require a…

Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…

We study the problem of Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) under constraints in the offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting. We consider the scenario where: (i) we have a dataset collected under a known baseline policy, (ii) multiple reward…

When modifying existing policies in high-risk settings, it is often necessary to ensure with high certainty that the newly proposed policy improves upon a baseline, such as the status quo. In this work, we consider the problem of safe…

Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, i.e., a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and…

Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and…

In reinforcement learning, it is typical to use the empirically observed transitions and rewards to estimate the value of a policy via either model-based or Q-fitting approaches. Although straightforward, these techniques in general yield…

Most theoretically motivated work in the offline reinforcement learning setting requires precise uncertainty estimates. This requirement restricts the algorithms derived in that work to the tabular and linear settings where such estimates…

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Safe policy improvement (SPI) is an offline reinforcement learning problem in which a new policy that reliably outperforms the behavior policy with high confidence needs to be computed using only a dataset and the behavior policy. Markov…

Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…

In this paper, we show how a simulated Markov decision process (MDP) built by the so-called \emph{baseline} policies, can be used to compute a different policy, namely the \emph{simulated optimal} policy, for which the performance of this…

To design effective digital interventions, experimenters face the challenge of learning decision policies that balance multiple objectives using offline data. Often, they aim to develop policies that maximize goal outcomes, while ensuring…