Related papers: Stable and Efficient Policy Evaluation
Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…
While the classic off-policy evaluation (OPE) literature commonly assumes decision time points to be evenly spaced for simplicity, in many real-world scenarios, such as those involving user-initiated visits, decisions are made at…
A great variety of off-policy learning algorithms exist in the literature, and new breakthroughs in this area continue to be made, improving theoretical understanding and yielding state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. In this…
We consider evaluating and training a new policy for the evaluation data by using the historical data obtained from a different policy. The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to estimate the expected reward of a new policy over the…
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…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many…
We propose a unified framework to study policy evaluation (PE) and the associated temporal difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space. We show that PE is equivalent to maintaining the martingale…
Reinforcement learning has been central to recent advances in large language model reasoning, but most algorithms rely on on-policy training that demands fresh rollouts at every update, limiting efficiency and scalability. Asynchronous RL…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
Sample efficiency is crucial for imitation learning methods to be applicable in real-world applications. Many studies improve sample efficiency by extending adversarial imitation to be off-policy regardless of the fact that these off-policy…
As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…
Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are applied to learn performant, well-generalizing policies when provided with a static dataset of interactions. Many recent approaches to offline RL have seen substantial success, but with one…
Integral to recent successes in deep reinforcement learning has been a class of temporal difference methods that use infrequently updated target values for policy evaluation in a Markov Decision Process. Yet a complete theoretical…
Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…
The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…
In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…
In this work, we consider the off-policy policy evaluation problem for contextual bandits and finite horizon reinforcement learning in the nonstationary setting. Reusing old data is critical for policy evaluation, but existing estimators…
We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…