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Related papers: POPO: Pessimistic Offline Policy Optimization

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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

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo , Matteo Papini

Offline zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn agents that optimize unseen reward functions without additional environment interaction. The standard approach to this problem trains task-conditioned policies by sampling task…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Nazim Bendib , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Olivier Sigaud

Supervised imitation-based approaches are often favored over off-policy reinforcement learning approaches for learning policies offline, since their straightforward optimization objective makes them computationally efficient and stable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Adam Jelley , Trevor McInroe , Sam Devlin , Amos Storkey

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

Offline learning is a key part of making reinforcement learning (RL) useable in real systems. Offline RL looks at scenarios where there is data from a system's operation, but no direct access to the system when learning a policy. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Arthur Argenson , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold

Offline RL algorithms must account for the fact that the dataset they are provided may leave many facets of the environment unknown. The most common way to approach this challenge is to employ pessimistic or conservative methods, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-06 Dibya Ghosh , Anurag Ajay , Pulkit Agrawal , Sergey Levine

We consider offline policy optimization (OPO) in contextual bandits, where one is given a fixed dataset of logged interactions. While pessimistic regularizers are typically used to mitigate distribution shift, prior implementations thereof…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Lequn Wang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment. These are critical shortcomings for applying RL to real-world problems where…

Reinforcement learning (RL) in low-data and risk-sensitive domains requires performant and flexible deployment policies that can readily incorporate constraints during deployment. One such class of policies are the semi-parametric H-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Harshit Sikchi , Wenxuan Zhou , David Held

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to turn large datasets into powerful decision-making engines without any online interactions with the environment. This great promise has motivated a large amount of research that hopes to replicate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Louis Monier , Jakub Kmec , Alexandre Laterre , Thomas Pierrot , Valentin Courgeau , Olivier Sigaud , Karim Beguir

Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Ilya Kostrikov , Ashvin Nair , Sergey Levine

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL), a framework that trains a policy with offline RL and then further fine-tunes it with online RL, has been considered a promising recipe for data-driven decision-making. While sensible, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Junsu Kim , Seohong Park , Sergey Levine

Offline-to-online Reinforcement Learning (O2O RL) aims to improve the performance of offline pretrained policy using only a few online samples. Built on offline RL algorithms, most O2O methods focus on the balance between RL objective and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Yinmin Zhang , Jie Liu , Chuming Li , Yazhe Niu , Yaodong Yang , Yu Liu , Wanli Ouyang

Modern decision-making systems, from robots to web recommendation engines, are expected to adapt: to user preferences, changing circumstances or even new tasks. Yet, it is still uncommon to deploy a dynamically learning agent (rather than a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shengpu Tang , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Dipendra Misra , Alex Lamb , John Langford , Paul Mineiro , Sebastian Kochman

Inspired by the recent successes of Inverse Optimization (IO) across various application domains, we propose a novel offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) algorithm for continuous state and action spaces, leveraging the convex loss function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ioannis Dimanidis , Tolga Ok , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL), by combining the benefits of offline pretraining and online finetuning, promises enhanced sample efficiency and policy performance. However, existing methods, effective as they are, suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Ya-Qin Zhang

We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines a sample-efficient learning paradigm, where a policy is learned from static and previously collected datasets without additional interaction with the environment. The major obstacle to offline RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Yunfan Zhou , Xijun Li , Qingyu Qu

Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Rasool Fakoor , Jonas Mueller , Kavosh Asadi , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola