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We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Offline model selection (OMS), that is, choosing the best policy from a set of many policies given only logged data, is crucial for applying offline RL in real-world settings. One idea that has been extensively explored is to select…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Joshua P. Zitovsky , Daniel de Marchi , Rishabh Agarwal , Michael R. Kosorok

In this paper, we study the offline RL problem with linear function approximation. Our main structural assumption is that the MDP has low inherent Bellman error, which stipulates that linear value functions have linear Bellman backups with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Achieving fast and stable off-policy learning in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging. Most existing methods rely on semi-gradient temporal-difference (TD) methods for their simplicity and efficiency, but are consequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Esraa Elelimy , Brett Daley , Andrew Patterson , Marlos C. Machado , Adam White , Martha White

Recent development of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated superior performance of neural networks in solving challenging problems with large or even continuous state spaces. One specific approach is to deploy neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Martin Gottwald , Sven Gronauer , Hao Shen , Klaus Diepold

We show that the popular reinforcement learning (RL) strategy of estimating the state-action value (Q-function) by minimizing the mean squared Bellman error leads to a regression problem with confounding, the inputs and output noise being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Yutian Chen , Liyuan Xu , Caglar Gulcehre , Tom Le Paine , Arthur Gretton , Nando de Freitas , Arnaud Doucet

We study the exploration problem with approximate linear action-value functions in episodic reinforcement learning under the notion of low inherent Bellman error, a condition normally employed to show convergence of approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

Model-free algorithms for reinforcement learning typically require a condition called Bellman completeness in order to successfully operate off-policy with function approximation, unless additional conditions are met. However, Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Andrea Zanette

We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Runzhe Yang , Xingyuan Sun , Karthik Narasimhan

We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Nianli Peng , Muhang Tian , Brandon Fain

The Mean Square Error (MSE) is commonly utilized to estimate the solution of the optimal value function in the vast majority of offline reinforcement learning (RL) models and has achieved outstanding performance. However, we find that its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Yu Zhang , Rui Yu , Zhipeng Yao , Wenyuan Zhang , Jun Wang , Liming Zhang

General function approximation is a powerful tool to handle large state and action spaces in a broad range of reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios. However, theoretical understanding of non-stationary MDPs with general function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Songtao Feng , Ming Yin , Ruiquan Huang , Yu-Xiang Wang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

In reinforcement learning, the objective is almost always defined as a \emph{cumulative} function over the rewards along the process. However, there are many optimal control and reinforcement learning problems in various application fields,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Wei Cui , Wei Yu

In deep reinforcement learning, estimating the value function to evaluate the quality of states and actions is essential. The value function is often trained using the least squares method, which implicitly assumes a Gaussian error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Motoki Omura , Takayuki Osa , Yusuke Mukuta , Tatsuya Harada

Reliable long-horizon value prediction is difficult in offline reinforcement learning because fitted value methods combine bootstrapping, function approximation, and distribution shift, while standard guarantees often require Bellman…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Lars van der Laan , Nathan Kallus

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to learn optimal policies from static datasets without further environment interaction. A key challenge is the distribution shift between the learned and behavior policies, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Haohui Chen , Zhiyong Chen

Gradient-based methods for value estimation in reinforcement learning have favorable stability properties, but they are typically much slower than Temporal Difference (TD) learning methods. We study the root causes of this slowness and show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Arsalan Sharifnassab , Richard Sutton

The use of pessimism, when reasoning about datasets lacking exhaustive exploration has recently gained prominence in offline reinforcement learning. Despite the robustness it adds to the algorithm, overly pessimistic reasoning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Tengyang Xie , Ching-An Cheng , Nan Jiang , Paul Mineiro , Alekh Agarwal

In temporal difference (TD) learning, off-policy sampling is known to be more practical than on-policy sampling, and by decoupling learning from data collection, it enables data reuse. It is known that policy evaluation (including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri , Sanjay Shakkottai , Karthikeyan Shanmugam

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta
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