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Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Amal Alabdulkarim , Madhuri Singh , Gennie Mansi , Kaely Hall , Upol Ehsan , Mark O. Riedl

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yasir Zubayr Barlas , Kizito Salako

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising approach to avoid costly online interaction with the real environment. However, the performance of offline RL highly depends on the quality of the datasets, which may cause…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Yiwen Hou , Haoyuan Sun , Jinming Ma , Feng Wu

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

Offline reinforcement learning is used to train policies in scenarios where real-time access to the environment is expensive or impossible. As a natural consequence of these harsh conditions, an agent may lack the resources to fully observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Jayanth Reddy Regatti , Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Frank Cheng , Young Hun Jung , Abhishek Gupta , Urun Dogan

Autonomous operations of robots in unknown environments are challenging due to the lack of knowledge of the dynamics of the interactions, such as the objects' movability. This work introduces a novel Causal Reinforcement Learning approach…

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

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

Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Nathan Kallus , Angela Zhou

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise in robotics thanks to its ability to develop efficient robotic control procedures through self-training. In particular, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to solving the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Pierre Aumjaud , David McAuliffe , Francisco Javier Rodríguez Lera , Philip Cardiff

While off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are sample efficient due to gradient-based updates and data reuse in the replay buffer, they struggle with convergence to local optima due to limited exploration. On the other hand,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Bowen Zheng , Ran Cheng

We develop an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for learning an optimal policy from a training set composed of data from multiple individuals. This algorithm is developed with a view towards its use in mobile health.

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-07-19 S. A. Murphy , Y. Deng , E. B. Laber , H. R. Maei , R. S. Sutton , K. Witkiewitz

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically optimize their policies by performing expensive backward passes to update their network parameters. However, some agents can solve new tasks without updating any parameters by simply conditioning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Amir Moeini , Jiuqi Wang , Jacob Beck , Ethan Blaser , Shimon Whiteson , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) achieves tremendous success in sequential decision-making problems of many domains, it still faces key challenges of data inefficiency and the lack of interpretability. Interestingly, many researchers have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Yan Zeng , Ruichu Cai , Fuchun Sun , Libo Huang , Zhifeng Hao