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Related papers: Learning Pessimism for Robust and Efficient Off-Po…

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Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

Off-policy reinforcement learning has many applications including: learning from demonstration, learning multiple goal seeking policies in parallel, and representing predictive knowledge. Recently there has been an proliferation of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-01 Adam White , Martha White

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) provide a principled framework for optimizing sequential decision-making in domains where decisions must adapt over time in response to individual trajectories, such as healthcare, education, and digital…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Ruijia Zhang , Xiangyu Zhang , Zhengling Qi , Yue Wu , Yanxun Xu

Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Chandramouli Kamanchi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We consider the problem of online combinatorial optimization under semi-bandit feedback. The goal of the learner is to sequentially select its actions from a combinatorial decision set so as to minimize its cumulative loss. We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-14 Gergely Neu , Gábor Bartók

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

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

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

Reinforcement learning faces significant challenges when applied to tasks characterized by sparse reward structures. Although imitation learning, within the domain of supervised learning, offers faster convergence, it relies heavily on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Zeqiang Zhang , Fabian Wurzberger , Gerrit Schmid , Sebastian Gottwald , Daniel A. Braun

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

Learning contrastive representations from pairwise comparisons has achieved remarkable success in various fields, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and information retrieval. Collaborative filtering algorithms based on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Bin Liu , Qin Luo , Bang Wang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) promises the recovery of optimal policies from static datasets, yet it remains susceptible to the overestimation of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions, particularly in fractured and sparse data manifolds.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Sarthak Wanjari

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) aims at solving goal-reaching tasks with sparse rewards from an offline dataset. While prior work has demonstrated various approaches for agents to learn near-optimal policies, these…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Chenyang Cao , Zichen Yan , Renhao Lu , Junbo Tan , Xueqian Wang

Preference learning (PL) with large language models (LLMs) aims to align the LLMs' generations with human preferences. Previous work on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated promising results in in-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Chen Jia

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown effective in domains where the agent can learn policies by actively interacting with its operating environment. However, if we change the RL scheme to offline setting where the agent can only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Adversarial machine learning concerns situations in which learners face attacks from active adversaries. Such scenarios arise in applications such as spam email filtering, malware detection and fake image generation, where security methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 David Benfield , Stefano Coniglio , Phan Tu Vuong , Alain Zemkoho

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine