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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

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

Distributional reinforcement learning improves performance by capturing environmental stochasticity, but a comprehensive theoretical understanding of its effectiveness remains elusive. In addition, the intractable element of the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Seokhun Ju , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning using function approximation, where the approximating basis can change dynamically while interacting with the environment. A motivation for such an approach is maximizing the value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-05-04 Dotan Di Castro , Shie Mannor

Value function learning plays a central role in many state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning algorithms. Many popular algorithms like Q-learning do not optimize any objective function, but are fixed-point iterations of some variant of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Yihao Feng , Lihong Li , Qiang Liu

We design a new provably efficient algorithm for episodic reinforcement learning with generalized linear function approximation. We analyze the algorithm under a new expressivity assumption that we call "optimistic closure," which is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-10 Yining Wang , Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Akshay Krishnamurthy

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

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

In this paper, we study distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (robust offline RL), which seeks to find an optimal policy purely from an offline dataset that can perform well in perturbed environments. In specific, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Jose Blanchet , Miao Lu , Tong Zhang , Han Zhong

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Paria Rashidinejad , Banghua Zhu , Cong Ma , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell

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

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

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

Reinforcement Learning algorithms designed for high-dimensional spaces often enforce the Bellman equation on a sampled subset of states, relying on generalization to propagate knowledge across the state space. In this paper, we identify and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Brieuc Pinon , Raphaël Jungers , Jean-Charles Delvenne

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

Off-policy learning (OPL) often involves minimizing a risk estimator based on importance weighting to correct bias from the logging policy used to collect data. However, this method can produce an estimator with a high variance. A common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Imad Aouali , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , David Rohde , Anna Korba

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

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Existing value function approximation methods have been successfully used in many applications, but they often lack useful a priori error bounds. We propose a new approximate bilinear programming formulation of value function approximation,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2010-06-15 Marek Petrik , Shlomo Zilberstein

If we could define the set of all bad outcomes, we could hard-code an agent which avoids them; however, in sufficiently complex environments, this is infeasible. We do not know of any general-purpose approaches in the literature to avoiding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Michael K. Cohen , Marcus Hutter