English
Related papers

Related papers: Causality and Batch Reinforcement Learning: Comple…

200 papers

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

As a key component to intuitive cognition and reasoning solutions in human intelligence, causal knowledge provides great potential for reinforcement learning (RL) agents' interpretability towards decision-making by helping reduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Ruichu Cai , Siyang Huang , Jie Qiao , Wei Chen , Yan Zeng , Keli Zhang , Fuchun Sun , Yang Yu , Zhifeng Hao

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

We consider a model-based approach to perform batch off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Our method takes a mixture-of-experts approach to combine parametric and non-parametric models of the environment such that the final value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Scott Sussex , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Reinforcement learning is an essential paradigm for solving sequential decision problems under uncertainty. Despite many remarkable achievements in recent decades, applying reinforcement learning methods in the real world remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Zhihong Deng , Jing Jiang , Guodong Long , Chengqi Zhang

In this tutorial article, we aim to provide the reader with the conceptual tools needed to get started on research on offline reinforcement learning algorithms: reinforcement learning algorithms that utilize previously collected data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar , George Tucker , Justin Fu

Reinforcement learning (RL) and causal modelling naturally complement each other. The goal of causal modelling is to predict the effects of interventions in an environment, while the goal of reinforcement learning is to select interventions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Oliver Schulte , Pascal Poupart

Batch reinforcement learning enables policy learning without direct interaction with the environment during training, relying exclusively on previously collected sets of interactions. This approach is, therefore, well-suited for high-risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Amna Najib , Stefan Depeweg , Phillip Swazinna

Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benefits to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Matthew McLeod , Chunlok Lo , Matthew Schlegel , Andrew Jacobsen , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White , Adam White

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) requires the collection of interventional data, which is sometimes expensive and even unethical in the real world, such as in the autonomous driving and the medical field. Offline reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Wenxuan Zhu , Chao Yu , Qiang Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Annie Xie , Shagun Sodhani , Chelsea Finn , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

There are several ways to categorise reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as either model-based or model-free, policy-based or planning-based, on-policy or off-policy, and online or offline. Broad classification schemes such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Beren Millidge , Alexander Tschantz , Anil K Seth , Christopher L Buckley

The ability to learn from large batches of autonomously collected data for policy improvement -- a paradigm we refer to as batch online reinforcement learning -- holds the promise of enabling truly scalable robot learning by significantly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Perry Dong , Suvir Mirchandani , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Otmane Sakhi , Aleksei Arzhantsev , Imad Aouali , Flavian Vasile

Several practical applications of reinforcement learning involve an agent learning from past data without the possibility of further exploration. Often these applications require us to 1) identify a near optimal policy or to 2) estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Andrea Zanette

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Many reinforcement learning (RL) environments consist of independent entities that interact sparsely. In such environments, RL agents have only limited influence over other entities in any particular situation. Our idea in this work is that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Maximilian Seitzer , Bernhard Schölkopf , Georg Martius

Recently, Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of various algorithms and datasets. However, these methods usually focus on algorithmic advancements, ignoring that many low-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Yirui Wang , Yang Yue , Shuicheng Yan