English
Related papers

Related papers: Statistical Inference of the Value Function for Re…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Learning from multi-step off-policy data collected by a set of policies is a core problem of reinforcement learning (RL). Approaches based on importance sampling (IS) often suffer from large variances due to products of IS ratios. Typical…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Ilya Kostrikov , Ofir Nachum

Previous work has shown the unreliability of existing algorithms in the batch Reinforcement Learning setting, and proposed the theoretically-grounded Safe Policy Improvement with Baseline Bootstrapping (SPIBB) fix: reproduce the baseline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Thiago D. Simão , Romain Laroche , Rémi Tachet des Combes

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

We investigate the use of Reinforcement Learning for the optimal execution of meta-orders, where the objective is to execute incrementally large orders while minimizing implementation shortfall and market impact over an extended period of…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2025-11-20 Tomas Espana , Yadh Hafsi , Fabrizio Lillo , Edoardo Vittori

We study inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and imitation learning (IM), the problems of recovering a reward or policy function from expert's demonstrated trajectories. We propose a new way to improve the learning process by adding a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

Learning continuous control in high-dimensional sparse reward settings, such as robotic manipulation, is a challenging problem due to the number of samples often required to obtain accurate optimal value and policy estimates. While many…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Sreehari Rammohan , Shangqun Yu , Bowen He , Eric Hsiung , Eric Rosen , Stefanie Tellex , George Konidaris

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the setting of continuous time and space, for an infinite horizon with a discounted objective and the underlying dynamics driven by a stochastic differential equation. Built upon recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Hanyang Zhao , Wenpin Tang , David D. Yao

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

We consider the batch (off-line) policy learning problem in the infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Motivated by mobile health applications, we focus on learning a policy that maximizes the long-term average reward. We propose a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Peng Liao , Zhengling Qi , Runzhe Wan , Predrag Klasnja , Susan Murphy

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have demonstrated the capability of learning complex control policies from many types of environments. When learning policies for safety-critical applications, it is essential to be sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Yichuan Charlie Tang , Jian Zhang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In reinforcement learning, classic on-policy evaluation methods often suffer from high variance and require massive online data to attain the desired accuracy. Previous studies attempt to reduce evaluation variance by searching for or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Shangtong Zhang

The objective in a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) problem is to find a policy that optimizes the expected value of a performance metric such as the infinite-horizon cumulative discounted or long-run average cost/reward. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Prashanth L. A. , Michael Fu

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

An agent's ability to leverage past experience is critical for efficiently solving new tasks. Approximate solutions for new tasks can be obtained from previously derived value functions, as demonstrated by research on transfer learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul Kulkarni

The predominant approach in reinforcement learning is to assign credit to actions based on the expected return. However, we show that the return may depend on the policy in a way which could lead to excessive variance in value estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Hsiao-Ru Pan , Nico Gürtler , Alexander Neitz , Bernhard Schölkopf

Reinforcement learning has traditionally been studied with exponential discounting or the average reward setup, mainly due to their mathematical tractability. However, such frameworks fall short of accurately capturing human behavior, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 S. R. Eshwar , Mayank Motwani , Nibedita Roy , Gugan Thoppe

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

This paper demonstrates that continual relearning of control policies using incremental deep reinforcement learning (RL) can improve policy learning for non-stationary processes. We demonstrate this approach for a data-driven 'smart…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-06 Avisek Naug , Marcos Quiñones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas