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This paper addresses the problem of online inverse reinforcement learning for systems with limited data and uncertain dynamics. In the developed approach, the state and control trajectories are recorded online by observing an agent perform…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-21 Ryan Self , S M Nahid Mahmud , Katrine Hareland , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) have taken an iterative actor-critic approach involving off-policy evaluation. In this paper we show that simply doing one step of constrained/regularized policy improvement using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 David Brandfonbrener , William F. Whitney , Rajesh Ranganath , Joan Bruna

Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure in financial engineering, energy systems, and supply chain management. In these domains, Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a long-run CVaR criterion effectively mitigate cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Qixin Wang , Hao Cao , Jian-Qiang Hu , Mingjie Hu , Li Xia

Reinforcement learning in complex environments is a challenging problem. In particular, the success of reinforcement learning algorithms depends on a well-designed reward function. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) solves the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Rakhoon Hwang , Hanjin Lee , Hyung Ju Hwang

Innate values describe agents' intrinsic motivations, which reflect their inherent interests and preferences for pursuing goals and drive them to develop diverse skills that satisfy their various needs. Traditional reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Qin Yang

Instrumental variable (IV) methods offer a valuable approach to account for outcome data missing not-at-random. A valid missing data instrument is a measured factor which (i) predicts the nonresponse process and (ii) is independent of the…

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

In this paper, a novel approach to the output-feedback inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is developed by casting the IRL problem, for linear systems with quadratic cost functions, as a state estimation problem. Two observer-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-19 Ryan Self , Kevin Coleman , He Bai , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

Standard instrumental variables (IV) methods identify a Local Average Treatment Effect under monotonicity, which rules out defiers. In many empirical environments, however, distinct instruments may induce heterogeneous and even opposing…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-16 Johann Caro-Burnett

Offline reinforcement learning faces a significant challenge of value over-estimation due to the distributional drift between the dataset and the current learned policy, leading to learning failure in practice. The common approach is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Liting Chen , Jie Yan , Zhengdao Shao , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Saravan Rajmohan , Thomas Moscibroda , Dongmei Zhang

We investigate a simple objective for nonlinear instrumental variable (IV) regression based on a kernelized conditional moment restriction (CMR) known as a maximum moment restriction (MMR). The MMR objective is formulated by maximizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Rui Zhang , Masaaki Imaizumi , Bernhard Schölkopf , Krikamol Muandet

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy based on a dataset collected a priori. Due to the lack of further interactions with the environment, offline RL suffers from the insufficient coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Ying Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies are typically trained for fixed objectives, making reuse difficult when task requirements change. We study inference-time policy reuse: given a library of pre-trained policies and a new composite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Ihor Vitenko , Noha Ibrahim , Sihem Amer-Yahia

In this paper, we study nonparametric estimation of instrumental variable (IV) regressions. While recent advancements in machine learning have introduced flexible methods for IV estimation, they often encounter one or more of the following…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Zihao Li , Hui Lan , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Mengdi Wang , Masatoshi Uehara

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Shivakanth Sujit , Pedro H. M. Braga , Jorg Bornschein , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Off-dynamics reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment transition dynamics are different, can be formulated as learning in a robust Markov decision process (RMDP) where uncertainties in transition dynamics are imposed.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of learning the preferences of an agent from the observations of its behavior on a task. While this problem has been well investigated, the related problem of {\em online} IRL---where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Saurabh Arora , Prashant Doshi , Bikramjit Banerjee

Offline reinforcement learning has shown great promise in leveraging large pre-collected datasets for policy learning, allowing agents to forgo often-expensive online data collection. However, offline reinforcement learning from visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Cong Lu , Philip J. Ball , Tim G. J. Rudner , Jack Parker-Holder , Michael A. Osborne , Yee Whye Teh

We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning (RL) -- a well-motivated setting of RL that aims at policy optimization using only historical data. Despite its wide applicability, theoretical understandings of offline RL, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang