English
Related papers

Related papers: Off-Policy Fitted Q-Evaluation with Differentiable…

200 papers

We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Yi Su , Pavithra Srinath , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Arip Asadulaev , Maksim Bobrin , Salem Lahlou , Dmitry Dylov , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac

In this work, we take a fresh look at some old and new algorithms for off-policy, return-based reinforcement learning. Expressing these in a common form, we derive a novel algorithm, Retrace($\lambda$), with three desired properties: (1) it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-09 Rémi Munos , Tom Stepleton , Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare

A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Eric Graves , Ehsan Imani , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

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

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) learns optimal policies from fixed datasets, training a policy once and deploying it at inference time without further refinement. Inspired by model predictive control (MPC), we introduce an inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Rohan Deb , Stephen J. Wright , Arindam Banerjee

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is one of the most fundamental problems in reinforcement learning (RL) to estimate the expected long-term payoff of a given target policy with only experiences from another behavior policy that is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Yang Hu , Tianyi Chen , Na Li , Kai Wang , Bo Dai

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aishwarya Mandyam , Shengpu Tang , Jiayu Yao , Jenna Wiens , Barbara E. Engelhardt

We study the problem of off-policy policy evaluation (OPPE) in RL. In contrast to prior work, we consider how to estimate both the individual policy value and average policy value accurately. We draw inspiration from recent work in causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Aniruddh Raghu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

In the framework of Markov Decision Processes, off-policy learning, that is the problem of learning a linear approximation of the value function of some fixed policy from one trajectory possibly generated by some other policy. We briefly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-16 Matthieu Geist , Bruno Scherrer

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Off-policy evaluation is a key component of reinforcement learning which evaluates a target policy with offline data collected from behavior policies. It is a crucial step towards safe reinforcement learning and has been used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Jinlin Lai , Lixin Zou , Jiaxing Song

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

In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

Value function estimation is an indispensable subroutine in reinforcement learning, which becomes more challenging in the offline setting. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Value Estimation (HVE) to reduce value estimation error, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Xue-Kun Jin , Xu-Hui Liu , Shengyi Jiang , Yang Yu

Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Lucas Lehnert , Doina Precup

This paper presents a systematic study on gap-dependent sample complexity in offline reinforcement learning. Prior work showed when the density ratio between an optimal policy and the behavior policy is upper bounded (the optimal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Xinqi Wang , Qiwen Cui , Simon S. Du

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

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan