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Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in estimating sequential treatment strategies which take into account patient heterogeneity. However, health-outcome information, which is used as the reward for reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Aaron Sonabend-W , Nilanjana Laha , Ashwin N. Ananthakrishnan , Tianxi Cai , Rajarshi Mukherjee

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

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Leonid Peshkin , Christian R. Shelton

Sequential decision making in the presence of uncertainty and stochastic dynamics gives rise to distributions over state/action trajectories in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control problems. This observation has led to a variety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Jad Rahme , Ryan P. Adams

Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-14 Tatsuki Takahashi , Chihiro Maru , Hiroko Shoji

We study offline reinforcement learning under $Q^\star$-approximation and partial coverage, a setting that motivates practical algorithms such as Conservative $Q$-Learning (CQL; Kumar et al., 2020) but has received limited theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Haolin Liu , Braham Snyder , Chen-Yu Wei

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). One major limitation of most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods is that they are on-policy RL in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jing Liang , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Jinyi Liu , Yan Zheng , Shuyue Hu , Lei Bai , Jianye Hao

Offline policy evaluation is a fundamental statistical problem in reinforcement learning that involves estimating the value function of some decision-making policy given data collected by a potentially different policy. In order to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Juan C. Perdomo , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Peter Bartlett , Sham Kakade

We establish a new connection between value and policy based reinforcement learning (RL) based on a relationship between softmax temporal value consistency and policy optimality under entropy regularization. Specifically, we show that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-27 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Kelvin Xu , Dale Schuurmans

Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Yunhao Tang , Tadashi Kozuno , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to learn the reward function from expert trajectories, to understand the task for imitation or collaboration thereby removing the need for manual reward engineering. However, IRL in the context of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Yikang Gui , Prashant Doshi

Sample efficiency is critical when applying learning-based methods to robotic manipulation due to the high cost of collecting expert demonstrations and the challenges of on-robot policy learning through online Reinforcement Learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Arsh Tangri , Ondrej Biza , Dian Wang , David Klee , Owen Howell , Robert Platt

Estimation of importance sampling weights for off-policy evaluation of contextual bandits often results in imbalance - a mismatch between the desired and the actual distribution of state-action pairs after weighting. In this work we present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Arjun Sondhi , David Arbour , Drew Dimmery

Constraint-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) involves policy constraints or imposing penalties on the value function to mitigate overestimation errors caused by distributional shift. This paper focuses on a limitation in existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Junghyuk Yeom , Yonghyeon Jo , Jungmo Kim , Sanghyeon Lee , Seungyul Han

The prevalent use of benchmarks in current offline reinforcement learning (RL) research has led to a neglect of the imbalance of real-world dataset distributions in the development of models. The real-world offline RL dataset is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Li Jiang , Sijie Cheng , Jielin Qiu , Haoran Xu , Wai Kin Chan , Zhao Ding

This paper presents a method for learning logical task specifications and cost functions from demonstrations. Constructing specifications by hand is challenging for complex objectives and constraints in autonomous systems. Instead, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Tianyu Wang , Nikolay Atanasov

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

We study off-policy evaluation in the setting of contextual bandits, where we aim to evaluate a new policy using historical data that consists of contexts, actions and received rewards. This historical data typically does not faithfully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Rong J. B. Zhu