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Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective learning from previously collected data without exploration, which shows great promise in real-world applications when exploration is expensive or even infeasible. The discount factor,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Hao Hu , Yiqin Yang , Qianchuan Zhao , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Shivakanth Sujit , Pedro H. M. Braga , Jorg Bornschein , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

The Robust Regularized Markov Decision Process (RRMDP) is proposed to learn policies robust to dynamics shifts by adding regularization to the transition dynamics in the value function. Existing methods mostly use unstructured…

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

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo , Matteo Papini

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving complex decision-making problems. However, DRL-based systems still face significant dependability challenges particularly in real-time environments due to the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Guoxin Su , Thomas Robinson , Hoa Khanh Dam , Li Liu , David S. Rosenblum

While many real-world problems that might benefit from reinforcement learning, these problems rarely fit into the MDP mold: interacting with the environment is often expensive and specifying reward functions is challenging. Motivated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Kyle Hatch , Benjamin Eysenbach , Rafael Rafailov , Tianhe Yu , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

We study offline dynamic pricing when historical data provide incomplete coverage of the price space such that some candidate prices, including the optimal one, may be entirely unobserved. This setting is common in practice and is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-25 Zeyu Bian , Lan Wang , Zhengling Qi

How can we train a dialog model to produce better conversations by learning from human feedback, without the risk of humans teaching it harmful chat behaviors? We start by hosting models online, and gather human feedback from real-time,…

The goal in offline data-driven decision-making is synthesize decisions that optimize a black-box utility function, using a previously-collected static dataset, with no active interaction. These problems appear in many forms: offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Han Qi , Yi Su , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

While offline reinforcement learning provides reliable policies for real-world deployment, its inherent pessimism severely restricts an agent's ability to explore and collect novel data online. Drawing inspiration from safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Amirhossein Roknilamouki , Arnob Ghosh , Eylem Ekici , Ness B. Shroff

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is attracting tremendous attention in the autonomous driving task as a powerful control technique. The success of an MPC controller strongly depends on an accurate internal dynamics model. However, the static…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Yuan Zhang , Joschka Boedecker , Chuxuan Li , Guyue Zhou

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

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for recommender systems, enabling effective policy learning by interacting with frozen world models. However, the reward functions in these world models,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Xuwei Xu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Model-based offline optimization with dynamics-aware policy provides a new perspective for policy learning and out-of-distribution generalization, where the learned policy could adapt to different dynamics enumerated at the training stage.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Chengxing Jia , Hao Yin , Chenxiao Gao , Tian Xu , Lei Yuan , Zongzhang Zhang , Yang Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Sindhu Padakandla