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Related papers: Towards Instance-Optimal Offline Reinforcement Lea…

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Several recent works have proposed instance-dependent upper bounds on the number of episodes needed to identify, with probability $1-\delta$, an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in finite-horizon tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). These…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-13 Aymen Al-Marjani , Andrea Tirinzoni , Emilie Kaufmann

This paper studies offline policy learning, which aims at utilizing observations collected a priori (from either fixed or adaptively evolving behavior policies) to learn an optimal individualized decision rule that achieves the best overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ying Jin , Zhimei Ren , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gene Li

We study model-based reinforcement learning in an unknown finite communicating Markov decision process. We propose a simple algorithm that leverages a variance based confidence interval. We show that the proposed algorithm, UCRL-V, achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Aristide Tossou , Debabrota Basu , Christos Dimitrakakis

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Jiafan He , Heyang Zhao , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) we have no opportunity to explore so we must make assumptions that the data is sufficient to guide picking a good policy, taking the form of assuming some coverage, realizability, Bellman completeness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Masatoshi Uehara , Nathan Kallus , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

We present a novel observation about the behavior of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: on many benchmark datasets, offline RL can produce well-performing and safe policies even when trained with "wrong" reward labels, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Anqi Li , Dipendra Misra , Andrey Kolobov , Ching-An Cheng

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Yuanzhao Zhai , Yiying Li , Zijian Gao , Xudong Gong , Kele Xu , Dawei Feng , Ding Bo , Huaimin Wang

Offline RL algorithms must account for the fact that the dataset they are provided may leave many facets of the environment unknown. The most common way to approach this challenge is to employ pessimistic or conservative methods, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-06 Dibya Ghosh , Anurag Ajay , Pulkit Agrawal , Sergey Levine

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy training and deployment environments are different. To deal with this environmental perturbation, we focus on learning policies robust to uncertainties in transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy learns to maximize cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. Towards conservative strategy, current methods choose to regularize the behavior policy or learn a lower bound of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Yuhang Jiang , Shuncheng He , Xiangyang Ji

In this paper, we study the problem of efficient online reinforcement learning in the infinite horizon setting when there is an offline dataset to start with. We assume that the offline dataset is generated by an expert but with unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Dengwang Tang , Rahul Jain , Botao Hao , Zheng Wen

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a challenging setting where existing off-policy actor-critic methods perform poorly due to the overestimation of out-of-distribution state-action pairs. Thus, various additional augmentations are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Zifeng Zhuang , Kun Lei , Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang , Yilang Guo

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we seek to utilize offline data to evaluate (or learn) policies in scenarios where the data are collected from a distribution that substantially differs from that of the target policy to be evaluated.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ruosong Wang , Yifan Wu , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sham M. Kakade

We study value adaptation in offline-to-online reinforcement learning under general function approximation. Starting from an imperfect offline pretrained $Q$-function, the learner aims to adapt it to the target environment using only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Shangzhe Li , Weitong Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the return given a fixed dataset of agent trajectories without additional interactions with the environment. While algorithm development has progressed rapidly, significant theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Fengdi Che

There have been many recent advances on provably efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in problems with rich observation spaces. However, all these works share a strong realizability assumption about the optimal value function of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

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