English
Related papers

Related papers: Towards Robust Off-policy Learning for Runtime Unc…

200 papers

Off-policy prediction -- learning the value function for one policy from data generated while following another policy -- is one of the most challenging subproblems in reinforcement learning. This paper presents empirical results with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Sina Ghiassian , Richard S. Sutton

In this tutorial article, we aim to provide the reader with the conceptual tools needed to get started on research on offline reinforcement learning algorithms: reinforcement learning algorithms that utilize previously collected data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar , George Tucker , Justin Fu

Experience replay (ER) used in (deep) reinforcement learning is considered to be applicable only to off-policy algorithms. However, there have been some cases in which ER has been applied for on-policy algorithms, suggesting that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Taisuke Kobayashi

When observed decisions depend only on observed features, off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) methods for sequential decision making problems can estimate the performance of evaluation policies before deploying them. This assumption is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-13 Hongseok Namkoong , Ramtin Keramati , Steve Yadlowsky , Emma Brunskill

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) have received rising interest due to its appealing data efficiency. The present study addresses behavior estimation, a task that lays the foundation of many offline RL algorithms. Behavior estimation aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Guoxi Zhang , Hisashi Kashima

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial when online exploration is costly or unsafe but often struggles with high epistemic uncertainty due to limited data. Existing methods rely on fixed conservative policies, restricting adaptivity…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Jihwan Jeong , Xiaoyu Wang , Jingmin Wang , Scott Sanner , Pascal Poupart

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong 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

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

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

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but counteracting off-policy bias without exacerbating variance is challenging. Classically, off-policy bias is corrected in a per-decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Brett Daley , Martha White , Christopher Amato , Marlos C. Machado

Sequential decision problems are widely studied across many areas of science. A key challenge when learning policies from historical data - a practice commonly referred to as off-policy learning - is how to ``identify'' the impact of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Joakim Blach Andersen , Qingyuan Zhao

Off-policy reinforcement learning aims to leverage experience collected from prior policies for sample-efficient learning. However, in practice, commonly used off-policy approximate dynamic programming methods based on Q-learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Aviral Kumar , Justin Fu , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

In offline model-based reinforcement learning (offline MBRL), we learn a dynamic model from historically collected data, and subsequently utilize the learned model and fixed datasets for policy learning, without further interacting with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Shentao Yang , Shujian Zhang , Yihao Feng , Mingyuan Zhou

The stable combination of optimal feedback policies with online learning is studied in a new control-theoretic framework for uncertain nonlinear systems. The framework can be systematically used in transfer learning and sim-to-real…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-13 Brett T. Lopez , Jean-Jacques E. Slotine

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Teng Xiao , Suhang Wang

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

Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Ilya Kostrikov , Ashvin Nair , Sergey Levine

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Konstantin Hess , Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel