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We pursue a life-long learning approach to artificial intelligence that makes extensive use of reinforcement learning algorithms. We build on our prior work with general value functions (GVFs) and the Horde architecture. GVFs have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-28 Adam White , Joseph Modayil , Richard S. Sutton

Markov reward processes (MRPs) are used to model stochastic phenomena arising in operations research, control engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence, as well as communication and transportation networks. In many of these cases,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-17 Ashwin Pananjady , Martin J. Wainwright

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Wenshuo Guo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-02 Yuhan Li , Eugene Han , Yifan Hu , Wenzhuo Zhou , Zhengling Qi , Yifan Cui , Ruoqing Zhu

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

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is an important practical problem in algorithmic ranking systems, where the goal is to estimate the expected performance of a new ranking policy using only offline logged data collected under a different, logging…

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

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

Recent Offline Reinforcement Learning methods have succeeded in learning high-performance policies from fixed datasets of experience. A particularly effective approach learns to first identify and then mimic optimal decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Jake Grigsby , Yanjun Qi

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit

In the framework of Markov Decision Processes, off-policy learning, that is the problem of learning a linear approximation of the value function of some fixed policy from one trajectory possibly generated by some other policy. We briefly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-16 Matthieu Geist , Bruno Scherrer

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

For industrial learning-to-rank (LTR) systems, it is common that the output of a ranking model is modified, either as a results of post-processing logic that enforces business requirements, or as a result of unforeseen design flaws or bugs…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Matej Jakimov , Alexander Buchholz , Yannik Stein , Thorsten Joachims

Imitation learning has proven effective for training robots to perform complex tasks from expert human demonstrations. However, it remains limited by its reliance on high-quality, task-specific data, restricting adaptability to the diverse…

In this work, we address the challenging problem of long-horizon goal-reaching policy learning from non-expert, action-free observation data. Unlike fully labeled expert data, our data is more accessible and avoids the costly process of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-09 RenMing Huang , Shaochong Liu , Yunqiang Pei , Peng Wang , Guoqing Wang , Yang Yang , Hengtao Shen

Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Marius Memmel , Puze Liu , Davide Tateo , Jan Peters

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…