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Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Jared Markowitz , Jesse Silverberg , Gary Collins

We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-13 Sungee Hong , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aishwarya Mandyam , Shengpu Tang , Jiayu Yao , Jenna Wiens , Barbara E. Engelhardt

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Da Xu , Yuting Ye , Chuanwei Ruan , Bo Yang

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Supervised imitation-based approaches are often favored over off-policy reinforcement learning approaches for learning policies offline, since their straightforward optimization objective makes them computationally efficient and stable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Adam Jelley , Trevor McInroe , Sam Devlin , Amos Storkey

The objective of offline RL is to learn optimal policies when a fixed exploratory demonstrations data-set is available and sampling additional observations is impossible (typically if this operation is either costly or rises ethical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Firas Jarboui , Vianney Perchet

Reinforcement learning (RL) in low-data and risk-sensitive domains requires performant and flexible deployment policies that can readily incorporate constraints during deployment. One such class of policies are the semi-parametric H-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Harshit Sikchi , Wenxuan Zhou , David Held

Off-policy learning (OPL) in contextual bandits aims to learn a decision-making policy that maximizes the target rewards by using only historical interaction data collected under previously developed policies. Unfortunately, when rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Rikiya Takehi , Masahiro Asami , Kosuke Kawakami , Yuta Saito

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

We consider the offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the agent aims to compute a policy that maximizes expected return while satisfying given cost constraints, learning only from a pre-collected dataset. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Jongmin Lee , Cosmin Paduraru , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Nicolas Heess , Doina Precup , Kee-Eung Kim , Arthur Guez

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

Evaluating policies using off-policy data is crucial for applying reinforcement learning to real-world problems such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Previous methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) generally suffer from high variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Shreyas Chaudhari , Ameet Deshpande , Bruno Castro da Silva , Philip S. Thomas

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Riashat Islam , Komal K. Teru , Deepak Sharma , Joelle Pineau

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines a sample-efficient learning paradigm, where a policy is learned from static and previously collected datasets without additional interaction with the environment. The major obstacle to offline RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Yunfan Zhou , Xijun Li , Qingyu Qu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a fixed batch of data. Due to errors in value estimation from out-of-distribution actions, most offline RL algorithms take the approach of constraining or regularizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Scott Fujimoto , Shixiang Shane Gu

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Arip Asadulaev , Maksim Bobrin , Salem Lahlou , Dmitry Dylov , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac