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In this paper, we argue that the paradigm commonly adopted for offline evaluation of sequential recommender systems is unsuitable for evaluating reinforcement learning-based recommenders. We find that most of the existing offline evaluation…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Romain Deffayet , Thibaut Thonet , Jean-Michel Renders , Maarten de Rijke

End-to-end learning robotic manipulation with high data efficiency is one of the key challenges in robotics. The latest methods that utilize human demonstration data and unsupervised representation learning has proven to be a promising…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Jin Li , Xianyuan Zhan , Zixu Xiao , Guyue Zhou

Learning effective reinforcement learning (RL) policies to solve real-world complex tasks can be quite challenging without a high-fidelity simulation environment. In most cases, we are only given imperfect simulators with simplified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Haoyi Niu , Shubham Sharma , Yiwen Qiu , Ming Li , Guyue Zhou , Jianming Hu , Xianyuan Zhan

Recommender systems (RecSys) have become critical tools for enhancing user engagement by delivering personalized content across diverse digital platforms. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yi Zhang , Lili Xie , Ruihong Qiu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown effective in domains where the agent can learn policies by actively interacting with its operating environment. However, if we change the RL scheme to offline setting where the agent can only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

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

Pretraining reinforcement learning (RL) models on offline datasets is a promising way to improve their training efficiency in online tasks, but challenging due to the inherent mismatch in dynamics and behaviors across various tasks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Minting Pan , Yitao Zheng , Yunbo Wang , Xiaokang Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is notoriously data-inefficient, which makes training on a real robot difficult. While model-based RL algorithms (world models) improve data-efficiency to some extent, they still require hours or days of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Yunhai Feng , Nicklas Hansen , Ziyan Xiong , Chandramouli Rajagopalan , Xiaolong Wang

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

Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yuzheng Hu , Fan Wu , Haotian Ye , David Forsyth , James Zou , Nan Jiang , Jiaqi W. Ma , Han Zhao

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevalent and effective methodology for real-world recommender systems, enabling learning policies from historical data and capturing user preferences. In offline RL, reward shaping…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wenzheng Shu , Yanxiang Zeng , Yongxiang Tang , Teng Sha , Ning Luo , Yanhua Cheng , Xialong Liu , Fan Zhou , Peng Jiang

Generative models such as diffusion have been employed as world models in offline reinforcement learning to generate synthetic data for more effective learning. Existing work either generates diffusion models one-time prior to training or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zeyu Fang , Tian Lan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Tianhe Yu , Garrett Thomas , Lantao Yu , Stefano Ermon , James Zou , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn , Tengyu Ma

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved impressive performance in a variety of online settings in which an agent's ability to query the environment for transitions and rewards is effectively unlimited. However, in many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Anurag Ajay , Aviral Kumar , Pulkit Agrawal , Sergey Levine , Ofir Nachum

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

Sample efficiency is critical when applying learning-based methods to robotic manipulation due to the high cost of collecting expert demonstrations and the challenges of on-robot policy learning through online Reinforcement Learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Arsh Tangri , Ondrej Biza , Dian Wang , David Klee , Owen Howell , Robert Platt

We investigate what specific design choices enable successful online reinforcement learning (RL) on physical robots. Across 100 real-world training runs on three distinct robotic platforms, we systematically ablate algorithmic, systems, and…

Offline reinforcement learning aims to train a policy on a pre-recorded and fixed dataset without any additional environment interactions. There are two major challenges in this setting: (1) extrapolation error caused by approximating the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Dmitriy Akimov , Vladislav Kurenkov , Alexander Nikulin , Denis Tarasov , Sergey Kolesnikov