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Related papers: Is Pessimism Provably Efficient for Offline RL?

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Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Yuanzhao Zhai , Yiying Li , Zijian Gao , Xudong Gong , Kele Xu , Dawei Feng , Ding Bo , Huaimin Wang

We study the problem of representation transfer in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), where a learner has access to episodic data from a number of source tasks collected a priori, and aims to learn a shared representation to be used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Avinandan Bose , Simon Shaolei Du , Maryam Fazel

We study offline dynamic pricing when historical data provide incomplete coverage of the price space such that some candidate prices, including the optimal one, may be entirely unobserved. This setting is common in practice and is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-25 Zeyu Bian , Lan Wang , Zhengling Qi

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Chinmaya Kausik , Yangyi Lu , Kevin Tan , Maggie Makar , Yixin Wang , Ambuj Tewari

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Empowered by expressive function approximators such as neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) achieves tremendous empirical successes. However, learning expressive function approximators requires collecting a large dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Lingxiao Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

This paper considers an online reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages pre-collected data (passive memory) from the environment for online interaction. We show that using passive memory improves performance and further provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Anay Pattanaik , Lav R. Varshney

We consider the offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting where the agent aims to optimize the policy solely from the data without further environment interactions. In offline RL, the distributional shift becomes the primary source of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Jongmin Lee , Wonseok Jeon , Byung-Jun Lee , Joelle Pineau , Kee-Eung Kim

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Ruosong Wang , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade

Motivated by the success of ensembles for uncertainty estimation in supervised learning, we take a renewed look at how ensembles of $Q$-functions can be leveraged as the primary source of pessimism for offline reinforcement learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour , Shixiang Shane Gu , Ofir Nachum

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents typically learn world models by minimizing predictive loss. However, powerful RL optimizers inevitably exploit minor model inaccuracies, leading to simulator exploitation and a reality gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri

We consider a challenging theoretical problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL): obtaining sample-efficiency guarantees with a dataset lacking sufficient coverage, under only realizability-type assumptions for the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

A promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to constrain the learned policy to stay close to the dataset behaviors, known as policy constraint offline RL. However, existing works heavily rely on the purity of the data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Liu Liu , Deheng Ye , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime F. Fisac

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