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Related papers: Is Pessimism Provably Efficient for Offline RL?

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Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an agent from pre-collected datasets, avoiding unsafe and inefficient real-time interaction. However, inevitable access to out-ofdistribution actions during the learning process introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Fan Zhang , Baoru Huang , Xin Zhang

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected data. However, it faces challenges of distributional shift, where the learned policy may encounter unseen scenarios not covered in the offline data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jin Zhu , Xin Zhou , Jiaang Yao , Gholamali Aminian , Omar Rivasplata , Simon Little , Lexin Li , Chengchun Shi

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective learning from previously collected data without exploration, which shows great promise in real-world applications when exploration is expensive or even infeasible. The discount factor,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Hao Hu , Yiqin Yang , Qianchuan Zhao , Chongjie Zhang

This paper studies offline policy learning, which aims at utilizing observations collected a priori (from either fixed or adaptively evolving behavior policies) to learn an optimal individualized decision rule that achieves the best overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ying Jin , Zhimei Ren , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

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

Dynamic mechanism design has garnered significant attention from both computer scientists and economists in recent years. By allowing agents to interact with the seller over multiple rounds, where agents' reward functions may change with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Boxiang Lyu , Zhaoran Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhuoran Yang

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Lei Zhao , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai

Pessimism is of great importance in offline reinforcement learning (RL). One broad category of offline RL algorithms fulfills pessimism by explicit or implicit behavior regularization. However, most of them only consider policy divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Chen Chen , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Chao Wang , Qianli Shen , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

We present a model-based offline reinforcement learning policy performance lower bound that explicitly captures dynamics model misspecification and distribution mismatch and we propose an empirical algorithm for optimal offline policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Kefan Dong , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Allen Nie , Emma Brunskill

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn policies from previously collected datasets without exploring the environment. Directly applying off-policy algorithms to offline RL usually fails due to the extrapolation error caused by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Chenjia Bai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhihong Deng , Animesh Garg , Peng Liu , Zhaoran Wang

The Robust Regularized Markov Decision Process (RRMDP) is proposed to learn policies robust to dynamics shifts by adding regularization to the transition dynamics in the value function. Existing methods mostly use unstructured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Cheng Tang , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

The remarkable success of reinforcement learning (RL) heavily relies on observing the reward of every visited state-action pair. In many real world applications, however, an agent can observe only a score that represents the quality of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Tengyu Xu , Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang

We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Chenjie Mao

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promising results in learning a task-specific policy from a fixed dataset. However, successful offline RL often relies heavily on the coverage and quality of the given dataset. In scenarios…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Chenjia Bai , Lingxiao Wang , Jianye Hao , Zhuoran Yang , Bin Zhao , Zhen Wang , Xuelong Li

Sample-efficient offline reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation has recently been studied extensively. Much of prior work has yielded the minimax-optimal bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{K}})$, with $K$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Ming Yin , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh , Raman Arora

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces distributional shift and unreliable value estimation, especially for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, existing uncertainty-based methods penalize the value function with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Xudong Yu , Chenjia Bai , Hongyi Guo , Changhong Wang , Zhen Wang

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the absence of active exploration calls for attention on the model robustness to tackle the sim-to-real gap, where the discrepancy between the simulated and deployed environments can significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 He Wang , Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown effective in domains where the agent can learn policies by actively interacting with its operating environment. However, if we change the RL scheme to offline setting where the agent can only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan