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Low-complexity models such as linear function representation play a pivotal role in enabling sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). The current paper pertains to a scenario with value-based linear representation, which postulates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuantao Gu , Yuting Wei

We study the offline reinforcement learning (RL) in the face of unmeasured confounders. Due to the lack of online interaction with the environment, offline RL is facing the following two significant challenges: (i) the agent may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zuyue Fu , Zhengling Qi , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Yanxun Xu , Michael R. Kosorok

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) leverages previously collected data for policy optimization without any further active exploration. Despite the recent interest in this problem, its theoretical results in neural network function…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-15 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Sunil Gupta , Hung Tran-The , Svetha Venkatesh

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

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we seek to utilize offline data to evaluate (or learn) policies in scenarios where the data are collected from a distribution that substantially differs from that of the target policy to be evaluated.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ruosong Wang , Yifan Wu , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sham M. Kakade

This article reviews the recent advances on the statistical foundation of reinforcement learning (RL) in the offline and low-adaptive settings. We will start by arguing why offline RL is the appropriate model for almost any real-life ML…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ming Yin , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

For continuous state-action space scenarios, classical reinforcement learning (RL) theory predominantly focuses on low-rank Markov decision processes (MDPs), which provide sample-efficient guarantees at the expense of restrictive structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Kun Long , Yuqiang Li , Xianyi Wu

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

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns effective policies from a static target dataset. The performance of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms notwithstanding, it relies on the size of the target dataset, and it degrades if limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Weiqin Chen , Xinjie Zhang , Sandipan Mishra , Santiago Paternain

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

This paper investigates a hybrid learning framework for reinforcement learning (RL) in which the agent can leverage both an offline dataset and online interactions to learn the optimal policy. We present a unified algorithm and analysis and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a fixed batch of data. Due to errors in value estimation from out-of-distribution actions, most offline RL algorithms take the approach of constraining or regularizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Scott Fujimoto , Shixiang Shane Gu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for data-driven decision-making and control. Compared to model-free methods, offline model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) explicitly learns world models from a static dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Jiayu Chen , Le Xu , Wentse Chen , Jeff Schneider

In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Mohit Prashant , Arvind Easwaran

To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Off-dynamics reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment transition dynamics are different, can be formulated as learning in a robust Markov decision process (RMDP) where uncertainties in transition dynamics are imposed.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

We consider the offline reinforcement learning problem, where the aim is to learn a decision making policy from logged data. Offline RL -- particularly when coupled with (value) function approximation to allow for generalization in large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

Learning a transition model via Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) followed by planning inside the learned model is perhaps the most standard and simplest Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. In this work, we show that such a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Zhiyong Wang , Dongruo Zhou , John C. S. Lui , Wen Sun