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Reinforcement learning (RL) has exceeded human performance in many synthetic settings such as video games and Go. However, real-world deployment of end-to-end RL models is less common, as RL models can be very sensitive to slight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Jing Dong , Jingwei Li , Baoxiang Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved state-of-the-art results in domains such as robotics and games. We build on this previous work by applying RL algorithms to a selection of canonical online stochastic optimization problems with a…

Offline reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms learn to make decisions using a given, fixed training dataset without online data collection. This problem setting is captivating because it holds the promise of utilizing previously collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Dan Elbaz , Gal Novik , Oren Salzman

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) represents a significant shift in RL research, allowing agents to learn from pre-collected datasets without further interaction with the environment. A key, yet underexplored, challenge in offline RL is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Yiqin Yang , Quanwei Wang , Chenghao Li , Hao Hu , Chengjie Wu , Yuhua Jiang , Dianyu Zhong , Ziyou Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Chongjie Zhang , Xu Bo

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-23 Sebastian Reboul , Hélène Halconruy , Randal Douc

We prove a fundamental limitation on the efficiency of a wide class of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. This limitation applies to model-free RL methods as well as a broad range of model-based methods, such as planning with tree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Brieuc Pinon , Raphaël Jungers , Jean-Charles Delvenne

Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) has attracted attention due to its capability to enhance reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, in terms of data efficiency and generalizability. In this paper, we develop a bilevel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

This paper presents a systematic study on gap-dependent sample complexity in offline reinforcement learning. Prior work showed when the density ratio between an optimal policy and the behavior policy is upper bounded (the optimal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Xinqi Wang , Qiwen Cui , Simon S. Du

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Han Zheng , Xufang Luo , Pengfei Wei , Xuan Song , Dongsheng Li , Jing Jiang

Batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms attempt to choose a policy from a designer-provided class of policies given a fixed set of training data. Choosing the policy which maximizes an estimate of return often leads to over-fitting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-13 Joshua Joseph , Javier Velez , Nicholas Roy

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns effective policies from a static target dataset. The performance of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms notwithstanding, it relies on the size of the target dataset, and it degrades if limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Weiqin Chen , Xinjie Zhang , Sandipan Mishra , Santiago Paternain

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rasool Fakoor , Murdock Aubry , Nicholas Stranges , Alexander J. Smola

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Gellért Weisz , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Yue Wang , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can acquire effective policies by utilizing previously collected experience, without any online interaction. It is widely understood that offline RL is able to extract good policies even from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Aviral Kumar , Joey Hong , Anikait Singh , Sergey Levine

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao