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Related papers: Safe Policy Improvement Approaches and their Limit…

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Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Philipp Scholl , Felix Dietrich , Clemens Otte , Steffen Udluft

In an offline reinforcement learning setting, the safe policy improvement (SPI) problem aims to improve the performance of a behavior policy according to which sample data has been generated. State-of-the-art approaches to SPI require a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Patrick Wienhöft , Marnix Suilen , Thiago D. Simão , Clemens Dubslaff , Christel Baier , Nils Jansen

This paper considers Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) in Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL): from a fixed dataset and without direct access to the true environment, train a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Romain Laroche , Paul Trichelair , Rémi Tachet des Combes

Previous work has shown the unreliability of existing algorithms in the batch Reinforcement Learning setting, and proposed the theoretically-grounded Safe Policy Improvement with Baseline Bootstrapping (SPIBB) fix: reproduce the baseline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Thiago D. Simão , Romain Laroche , Rémi Tachet des Combes

Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL) consists in training a policy using trajectories collected with another policy, called the behavioural policy. Safe policy improvement (SPI) provides guarantees with high probability that the trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Kimia Nadjahi , Romain Laroche , Rémi Tachet des Combes

We study the problem of Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) under constraints in the offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting. We consider the scenario where: (i) we have a dataset collected under a known baseline policy, (ii) multiple reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Harsh Satija , Philip S. Thomas , Joelle Pineau , Romain Laroche

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Thomas Rhemrev , Nils Jansen

Safe policy improvement (SPI) is an offline reinforcement learning problem in which a new policy that reliably outperforms the behavior policy with high confidence needs to be computed using only a dataset and the behavior policy. Markov…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Kasper Engelen , Guillermo A. Pérez , Marnix Suilen

We study safe policy improvement (SPI) for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). SPI is an offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem that assumes access to (1) historical data about an environment, and (2) the so-called…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Thiago D. Simão , Marnix Suilen , Nils Jansen

Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Florent Delgrange , Raphael Avalos , Willem Röpke

When modifying existing policies in high-risk settings, it is often necessary to ensure with high certainty that the newly proposed policy improves upon a baseline, such as the status quo. In this work, we consider the problem of safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Brian M Cho , Ana-Roxana Pop , Kyra Gan , Sam Corbett-Davies , Israel Nir , Ariel Evnine , Nathan Kallus

Most theoretically motivated work in the offline reinforcement learning setting requires precise uncertainty estimates. This requirement restricts the algorithms derived in that work to the tabular and linear settings where such estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 David Brandfonbrener , Remi Tachet des Combes , Romain Laroche

Safety is the priority concern when applying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to real-world control problems. While policy iteration provides a fundamental algorithm for standard RL, an analogous theoretical algorithm for safe RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Yujie Yang , Zhilong Zheng , Shengbo Eben Li , Wei Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Ya-Qin Zhang

Within batch reinforcement learning, safe policy improvement (SPI) seeks to ensure that the learnt policy performs at least as well as the behavior policy that generated the dataset. The core challenge in SPI is seeking improvements while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Abhishek Sharma , Leo Benac , Sonali Parbhoo , Finale Doshi-Velez

To design effective digital interventions, experimenters face the challenge of learning decision policies that balance multiple objectives using offline data. Often, they aim to develop policies that maximize goal outcomes, while ensuring…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-24 Brian Cho , Ana-Roxana Pop , Ariel Evnine , Nathan Kallus

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui

In optimal control problem, policy iteration (PI) is a powerful reinforcement learning (RL) tool used for designing optimal controller for the linear systems. However, the need for an initial stabilizing control policy significantly limits…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-13 Zhen Pang , Shengda Tang , Jun Cheng , Shuping He

Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) which is called Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Elad Sarafian , Aviv Tamar , Sarit Kraus

Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Manuel Wendl , Yarden As , Manish Prajapat , Anton Pollak , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause
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