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This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Reinforcement learning has traditionally been studied with exponential discounting or the average reward setup, mainly due to their mathematical tractability. However, such frameworks fall short of accurately capturing human behavior, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 S. R. Eshwar , Mayank Motwani , Nibedita Roy , Gugan Thoppe

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

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

Deep reinforcement learning has been able to solve various tasks successfully, however, due to the construction of policy gradient and training dynamics, tuning deep reinforcement learning models remains challenging. As one of the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hanyong Wang , Menglong Yang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is notoriously difficult in long- and infinite-horizon settings due to diminishing overlap between behavior and target policies. In this paper, we study the role of Markovian and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

Off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) use offline observational data to make better decisions, which is crucial in applications where online experimentation is limited. However, depending entirely on logged data, OPE/L is sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Kaiwen Wang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Johannes Ackermann , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy using a previously collected static dataset, is an important paradigm of RL. Standard RL methods often perform poorly in this regime due to the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Zhendong Wang , Jonathan J Hunt , Mingyuan Zhou

Many reinforcement learning algorithms rely on value estimation, however, the most widely used algorithms -- namely temporal difference algorithms -- can diverge under both off-policy sampling and nonlinear function approximation. Many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Andrew Patterson , Adam White , Martha White

In this paper, we study policy evaluation in continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL), where the state follows an unknown stochastic differential equation (SDE), but only discrete-time data are available. We first highlight that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-23 Yuhua Zhu

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability of deep learning applications and has attracted significant attention in recent years. A rich body of literature has emerged to develop efficient score functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Yuhang Liu , Yuefei Wu , Bin Shi , Bo Dong

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks robust policy training against environment perturbation by modeling dynamics uncertainty, calls for function approximations when facing large state-action spaces.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Ordinary differential equations (ODEs), via their induced flow maps, provide a powerful framework to parameterize invertible transformations for the purpose of representing complex probability distributions. While such models have achieved…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-06 Youssef Marzouk , Zhi Ren , Sven Wang , Jakob Zech

This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. We consider for the first time the semiparametric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Riashat Islam , Komal K. Teru , Deepak Sharma , Joelle Pineau

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-07-23 Mert Demirer , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Greg Lewis , Victor Chernozhukov