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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

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Melrose Roderick , Gaurav Manek , Felix Berkenkamp , J. Zico Kolter

Holdout validation and hyperparameter tuning from data is a long-standing problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL). A standard framework is to use off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods to evaluate and select the policies, but OPE either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Pai Liu , Lingfeng Zhao , Shivangi Agarwal , Jinghan Liu , Audrey Huang , Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many…

Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Tengyang Xie , Yifei Ma , Yu-Xiang Wang

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Harvineet Singh , Shalmali Joshi , Finale Doshi-Velez , Himabindu Lakkaraju

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Yihao Feng , Tongzheng Ren , Ziyang Tang , Qiang Liu

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

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

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Yudai Hayashi , Shuhei Goda , Yuta Saito

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

Counterfactual estimators are critical for learning and refining policies using logged data, a process known as Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE). OPE allows researchers to assess new policies without costly experiments, speeding up the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Ritam Guha , Nilavra Pathak

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of sample inefficiency in deep RL by using experience obtained in past tasks for a new task to be solved. However, most meta-RL methods require partially or fully on-policy data, i.e.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Takahisa Imagawa , Takuya Hiraoka , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Sample efficiency and exploration remain major challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL). A powerful approach that can be applied to address these issues is the inclusion of offline data, such as prior trajectories from a human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Philip J. Ball , Laura Smith , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-03 Yang Xu , Jin Zhu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Rui Song

Developing theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity of offline RL methods is an important step towards making data-hungry RL algorithms practically viable. Currently, most results hinge on unrealistic assumptions about the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Sunil Madhow , Dan Qiao , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

The core challenge of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is dealing with the (potentially catastrophic) extrapolation error induced by the distribution shift between the history dataset and the desired policy. A large portion of prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Laixi Shi , Robert Dadashi , Yuejie Chi , Pablo Samuel Castro , Matthieu Geist

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning optimal policies in environments where direct exploration is expensive or unfeasible. However, the adoption of such policies in practice is often challenging, as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Aaron Sonabend-W , Junwei Lu , Leo A. Celi , Tianxi Cai , Peter Szolovits