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Related papers: Adaptive Trade-Offs in Off-Policy Learning

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Off-policy learning algorithms have been known to be sensitive to the choice of hyper-parameters. However, unlike near on-policy algorithms for which hyper-parameters could be optimized via e.g. meta-gradients, similar techniques could not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunhao Tang , Krzysztof Choromanski

Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 James Bannon , Brad Windsor , Wenbo Song , Tao Li

We demonstrate that a wide array of machine learning algorithms are specific instances of one single paradigm: reciprocal learning. These instances range from active learning over multi-armed bandits to self-training. We show that all these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-05 Julian Rodemann , Christoph Jansen , Georg Schollmeyer

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

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

Many practical applications of reinforcement learning constrain agents to learn from a fixed batch of data which has already been gathered, without offering further possibility for data collection. In this paper, we demonstrate that due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Scott Fujimoto , David Meger , Doina Precup

We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Ben London , Levi Lu , Ted Sandler , Thorsten Joachims

Many reinforcement learning applications involve the use of data that is sensitive, such as medical records of patients or financial information. However, most current reinforcement learning methods can leak information contained within the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-04 Tengyang Xie , Philip S. Thomas , Gerome Miklau

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

We consider off-policy policy evaluation with function approximation (FA) in average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to estimate both the reward rate and the differential value function. For this problem, bootstrapping is necessary and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Shangtong Zhang , Yi Wan , Richard S. Sutton , Shimon Whiteson

Sequential decision problems are widely studied across many areas of science. A key challenge when learning policies from historical data - a practice commonly referred to as off-policy learning - is how to ``identify'' the impact of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Joakim Blach Andersen , Qingyuan Zhao

Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Bo Liu , Daoming Lyu , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz

Off-policy evaluation is a key component of reinforcement learning which evaluates a target policy with offline data collected from behavior policies. It is a crucial step towards safe reinforcement learning and has been used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Jinlin Lai , Lixin Zou , Jiaxing Song

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

In Reinforcement Learning, the optimal action at a given state is dependent on policy decisions at subsequent states. As a consequence, the learning targets evolve with time and the policy optimization process must be efficient at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Romain Laroche , Remi Tachet

When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Hoang M. Le , Cameron Voloshin , Yisong Yue

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but counteracting off-policy bias without exacerbating variance is challenging. Classically, off-policy bias is corrected in a per-decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Brett Daley , Martha White , Christopher Amato , Marlos C. Machado

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning effective policies from fixed datasets without any environment interaction. Existing methods typically employ policy constraints to mitigate the distribution shift encountered during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Tan Jing , Xiaorui Li , Chao Yao , Xiaojuan Ban , Yuetong Fang , Renjing Xu , Zhaolin Yuan

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with learning a rewarding policy by executing another policy that gathers samples of experience. While the former policy (i.e. target policy) is rewarding but in-expressive (in most cases,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Anji Liu , Yitao Liang , Guy Van den Broeck

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn