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Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an agent from pre-collected datasets, avoiding unsafe and inefficient real-time interaction. However, inevitable access to out-ofdistribution actions during the learning process introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Fan Zhang , Baoru Huang , Xin Zhang

By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Jared Markowitz , Jesse Silverberg , Gary Collins

Learning from Observations (LfO) is a practical reinforcement learning scenario from which many applications can benefit through the reuse of incomplete resources. Compared to conventional imitation learning (IL), LfO is more challenging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We benchmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational…

When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guopeng Li , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Julian F. P. Kooij

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

We consider the offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting where the agent aims to optimize the policy solely from the data without further environment interactions. In offline RL, the distributional shift becomes the primary source of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Jongmin Lee , Wonseok Jeon , Byung-Jun Lee , Joelle Pineau , Kee-Eung Kim

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from previously collected datasets. Recently, due to their powerful representational capabilities, diffusion models have shown significant potential as policy models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Tianle Zhang , Jiayi Guan , Lin Zhao , Yihang Li , Dongjiang Li , Zecui Zeng , Lei Sun , Yue Chen , Xuelong Wei , Lusong Li , Xiaodong He

Consider the following instance of the Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) problem: given the complete training logs of $N$ conventional RL agents, trained on $N$ different tasks, design a meta-agent that can quickly maximize reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Ron Dorfman , Idan Shenfeld , Aviv Tamar

Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Tengyu Xu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Yingbin Liang

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Melrose Roderick , Gaurav Manek , Felix Berkenkamp , J. Zico Kolter

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Sungee Hong , Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

We present a model-based offline reinforcement learning policy performance lower bound that explicitly captures dynamics model misspecification and distribution mismatch and we propose an empirical algorithm for optimal offline policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Kefan Dong , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Allen Nie , Emma Brunskill

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the challenge of expensive and high-risk data exploration inherent in RL by pre-training policies on vast amounts of offline data, enabling direct deployment or fine-tuning in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Thanh Nguyen , Tung M. Luu , Tri Ton , Chang D. Yoo

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies from fixed datasets without online interactions, but suffers from distribution shift, causing inaccurate evaluation and overestimation of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xuyang Chen , Keyu Yan , Wenhan Cao , Lin Zhao

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

The ability to discover approximately optimal policies in domains with sparse rewards is crucial to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Bogdan Mazoure , Thang Doan , Audrey Durand , R Devon Hjelm , Joelle Pineau