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We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Nishanth Venkatesh , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

We study high-confidence off-policy evaluation in the context of infinite-horizon Markov decision processes, where the objective is to establish a confidence interval (CI) for the target policy value using only offline data pre-collected…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Wenzhuo Zhou , Yuhan Li , Ruoqing Zhu , Annie Qu

We propose a new way of deriving policy gradient updates for reinforcement learning. Our technique, based on Fourier analysis, recasts integrals that arise with expected policy gradients as convolutions and turns them into multiplications.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-31 Matthew Fellows , Kamil Ciosek , Shimon Whiteson

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-02 Yuhan Li , Eugene Han , Yifan Hu , Wenzhuo Zhou , Zhengling Qi , Yifan Cui , Ruoqing Zhu

There have been key advancements to building universal approximators for multi-goal collections of reinforcement learning value functions -- key elements in estimating long-term returns of states in a parameterized manner. We extend this to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Rushiv Arora

In this work, we consider the off-policy policy evaluation problem for contextual bandits and finite horizon reinforcement learning in the nonstationary setting. Reusing old data is critical for policy evaluation, but existing estimators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Vincent Liu , Yash Chandak , Philip Thomas , Martha White

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

In recent years, fully differentiable rigid body physics simulators have been developed, which can be used to simulate a wide range of robotic systems. In the context of reinforcement learning for control, these simulators theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Katie Byl

Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Sergey Pankov

Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Qian Shao , Pradeep Varakantham , Shih-Fen Cheng

Applying reinforcement learning to robotic systems poses a number of challenging problems. A key requirement is the ability to handle continuous state and action spaces while remaining within a limited time and resource budget.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Benjamin van Niekerk , Andreas Damianou , Benjamin Rosman

Off-policy estimation for long-horizon problems is important in many real-life applications such as healthcare and robotics, where high-fidelity simulators may not be available and on-policy evaluation is expensive or impossible. Recently,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-26 Ali Mousavi , Lihong Li , Qiang Liu , Denny Zhou

Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Yao Liu , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskill

Inverse Reinforcement Learning infers a reward function from expert demonstrations, aiming to encode the behavior and intentions of the expert. Current approaches usually do this with generative and uni-modal models, meaning that they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Niklas Freymuth , Philipp Becker , Gerhard Neumann

In this paper, we explore deep reinforcement learning algorithms for vision-based robotic grasping. Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a range of challenging environments, but the proliferation of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Deirdre Quillen , Eric Jang , Ofir Nachum , Chelsea Finn , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Traditional model-based reinforcement learning approaches learn a model of the environment dynamics without explicitly considering how it will be used by the agent. In the presence of misspecified model classes, this can lead to poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Pierluca D'Oro , Alberto Maria Metelli , Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli