Related papers: Stable and Efficient Policy Evaluation

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,…

Learning the value function of a given policy from data samples is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning. TD($\lambda$) is a popular class of algorithms to solve this problem. However, the weights assigned to different $n$-step…

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods against input observation have garnered significant attention and undergone rapid evolution due to RL's potential vulnerability. Although these advanced methods have achieved reasonable…

Recently, \citet{SuttonMW15} introduced the emphatic temporal differences (ETD) algorithm for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. In this short note, we show that the projected fixed-point equation that underlies ETD…

In temporal difference (TD) learning, off-policy sampling is known to be more practical than on-policy sampling, and by decoupling learning from data collection, it enables data reuse. It is known that policy evaluation (including…

One of the most basic problems in reinforcement learning (RL) is policy evaluation: estimating the long-term return, i.e., value function, corresponding to a given fixed policy. The celebrated Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm…

Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem…

Designing effective model-based reinforcement learning algorithms is difficult because the ease of data generation must be weighed against the bias of model-generated data. In this paper, we study the role of model usage in policy…

Off-policy learning in dynamic decision problems is essential for providing strong evidence that a new policy is better than the one in use. But how can we prove superiority without testing the new policy? To answer this question, we…

In this paper, an off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm is designed to solve the continuous-time LQR problem using only input-state data measured from the system. Different from other algorithms in the literature, we propose the use…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental algorithm for estimating value functions in reinforcement learning. Recent finite-time analyses of TD with linear function approximation quantify its theoretical convergence rate. However,…

Recent work on policy learning from observational data has highlighted the importance of efficient policy evaluation and has proposed reductions to weighted (cost-sensitive) classification. But, efficient policy evaluation need not yield…

Off-policy learning enables a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to reason counterfactually about policies that are not executed and is one of the most important ideas in RL. It, however, can lead to instability when combined with function…

Temporal-difference (TD) learning is highly effective at controlling and evaluating an agent's long-term outcomes. Most approaches in this paradigm implement a semi-gradient update to boost the learning speed, which consists of ignoring the…

Policy iteration (PI) is a recursive process of policy evaluation and improvement for solving an optimal decision-making/control problem, or in other words, a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. PI has also served as the fundamental for…

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

General Value Function (GVF) is a powerful tool to represent both the {\em predictive} and {\em retrospective} knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, often multiple interrelated GVFs need to be evaluated jointly with…

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been successful in a wide variety of simulated domains. However, a major obstacle facing deep RL in the real world is their high sample complexity. Batch policy gradient methods offer…

Off-policy learning is key to scaling up reinforcement learning as it allows to learn about a target policy from the experience generated by a different behavior policy. Unfortunately, it has been challenging to combine off-policy learning…