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We introduce learning and planning algorithms for average-reward MDPs, including 1) the first general proven-convergent off-policy model-free control algorithm without reference states, 2) the first proven-convergent off-policy model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Yi Wan , Abhishek Naik , Richard S. Sutton

This paper investigates MDPs with intermittent state information. We consider a scenario where the controller perceives the state information of the process via an unreliable communication channel. The transmissions of state information…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Gongpu Chen , Soung-Chang Liew

This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Adith Swaminathan , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , John Langford , Damien Jose , Imed Zitouni

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) for episodic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with continuous states. Motivated by the recently proposed proximal causal inference framework, we develop a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Rui Miao , Zhengling Qi , Xiaoke Zhang

We consider the problem of learning a policy for a Markov decision process consistent with data captured on the state-actions pairs followed by the policy. We assume that the policy belongs to a class of parameterized policies which are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-01-24 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Hao Liu , Henghui Zhu , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

We study offline reinforcement learning problems with a long-run average reward objective. The state-action pairs generated by any fixed behavioral policy thus follow a Markov chain, and the {\em empirical} state-action-next-state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Mengmeng Li , Daniel Kuhn , Tobias Sutter

We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Matteo Papini

Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-19 Ian Waudby-Smith , Lili Wu , Aaditya Ramdas , Nikos Karampatziakis , Paul Mineiro

Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Sunil Gupta , A. Tuan Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

The principal contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework for off-policy reinforcement learning, based on conditional expectations of importance sampling ratios. This framework yields new perspectives and understanding of existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Hado van Hasselt , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul , Rémi Munos , Will Dabney

We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-18 Yingfei Wang , Chu Wang , Warren Powell

Despite the advances in probabilistic model checking, the scalability of the verification methods remains limited. In particular, the state space often becomes extremely large when instantiating parameterized Markov decision processes…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find optimal policies in dynamic environments in order to maximize the expected total rewards by leveraging pre-collected data. Learning from heterogeneous data is one of the fundamental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Rui Miao , Babak Shahbaba , Annie Qu

In this work, we decouple the iterative bi-level offline RL (value estimation and policy extraction) from the offline training phase, forming a non-iterative bi-level paradigm and avoiding the iterative error propagation over two levels.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Jinxin Liu , Hongyin Zhang , Zifeng Zhuang , Yachen Kang , Donglin Wang , Bin Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) considers problems where learning is performed using only previously collected samples and is helpful for the settings in which collecting new data is costly or risky. In model-based offline RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Mustafa O. Karabag , Ufuk Topcu

Off-policy evaluation and learning in contextual bandits use logged interaction data to estimate and optimize the value of a target policy. Most existing methods require sufficient action overlap between the logging and target policies, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Shu Tamano

We introduce an off-policy evaluation procedure for highlighting episodes where applying a reinforcement learned (RL) policy is likely to have produced a substantially different outcome than the observed policy. In particular, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Michael Oberst , David Sontag

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Huizhen Yu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Richard S. Sutton

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables but the behavior policy depends on latent states (Tennenholtz et al. (2020a)). Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Yash Nair , Nan Jiang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Imad Aouali , Otmane Sakhi