English
Related papers

Related papers: Chaining Value Functions for Off-Policy Learning

200 papers

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

We study high-confidence behavior-agnostic off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate a confidence interval on a target policy's value, given only access to a static experience dataset collected by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Bo Dai , Ofir Nachum , Yinlam Chow , Lihong Li , Csaba Szepesvári , Dale Schuurmans

Reinforcement learning with function approximation can be unstable and even divergent, especially when combined with off-policy learning and Bellman updates. In deep reinforcement learning, these issues have been dealt with empirically by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Dibya Ghosh , Marc G. Bellemare

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

We consider the off-policy evaluation problem of reinforcement learning using deep convolutional neural networks. We analyze the deep fitted Q-evaluation method for estimating the expected cumulative reward of a target policy, when the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Xiang Ji , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang , Tuo Zhao

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Olivier Jeunen , Aleksei Ustimenko

Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Kristopher De Asis , Eric Graves , Richard S. Sutton

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy needs to be learned from a single pre-collected dataset. Typically, policies are thus regularized during training to behave similarly to the data generating policy, by adding a penalty based on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Daniel Hein , Thomas Runkler

In applications of offline reinforcement learning to observational data, such as in healthcare or education, a general concern is that observed actions might be affected by unobserved factors, inducing confounding and biasing estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus

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

Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Ray Jiang , Tom Zahavy , Zhongwen Xu , Adam White , Matteo Hessel , Charles Blundell , Hado van Hasselt

We study deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with delayed rewards. In many real-world tasks, instant rewards are often not readily accessible or even defined immediately after the agent performs actions. In this work, we first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Beining Han , Zhizhou Ren , Zuofan Wu , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Neural control of memory-constrained, agile robots requires small, yet highly performant models. We leverage graph hyper networks to learn graph hyper policies trained with off-policy reinforcement learning resulting in networks that are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Shashank Hegde , Gaurav S. Sukhatme

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus , Lihong Li , Ali Mousavi

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Offline reinforcement learning provides a viable approach to obtain advanced control strategies for dynamical systems, in particular when direct interaction with the environment is not available. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Marc Weber , Phillip Swazinna , Daniel Hein , Steffen Udluft , Volkmar Sterzing

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

In many real-world multi-agent cooperative tasks, due to high cost and risk, agents cannot continuously interact with the environment and collect experiences during learning, but have to learn from offline datasets. However, the transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Jiechuan Jiang , Zongqing Lu