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Related papers: Policy learning "without" overlap: Pessimism and g…

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We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Matteo Papini

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), where the agent aims to learn the optimal policy based on the data collected by a behavior policy, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. While offline RL with linear function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Qiwei Di , Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

The use of pessimism, when reasoning about datasets lacking exhaustive exploration has recently gained prominence in offline reinforcement learning. Despite the robustness it adds to the algorithm, overly pessimistic reasoning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Tengyang Xie , Ching-An Cheng , Nan Jiang , Paul Mineiro , Alekh Agarwal

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

This study focuses on the topic of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a variant of conventional reinforcement learning that dispenses with the need for online interaction or specification of reward functions. Instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yachen Kang , Diyuan Shi , Jinxin Liu , Li He , Donglin Wang

Pessimism is of great importance in offline reinforcement learning (RL). One broad category of offline RL algorithms fulfills pessimism by explicit or implicit behavior regularization. However, most of them only consider policy divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Chen Chen , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Chao Wang , Qianli Shen , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find highly rewarding policy, by leveraging a previously collected static dataset and a dynamics model. While the dynamics model learned through reuse of the static dataset, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Kaiyang Guo , Yunfeng Shao , Yanhui Geng

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

Automated decision-making algorithms drive applications such as recommendation systems and search engines. These algorithms often rely on off-policy contextual bandits or off-policy learning (OPL). Conventionally, OPL selects actions that…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Leonid Peshkin , Christian R. Shelton

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

Learning control policies offline from pre-recorded datasets is a promising avenue for solving challenging real-world problems. However, available datasets are typically of mixed quality, with a limited number of the trajectories that we…

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

We consider the setting of iterative learning control, or model-based policy learning in the presence of uncertain, time-varying dynamics. In this setting, we propose a new performance metric, planning regret, which replaces the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Naman Agarwal , Elad Hazan , Anirudha Majumdar , Karan Singh

Designing learning algorithms that are resistant to perturbations of the underlying data distribution is a problem of wide practical and theoretical importance. We present a general approach to this problem focusing on unsupervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Andreas Maurer , Daniela A. Parletta , Andrea Paudice , Massimiliano Pontil

Offline reinforcement learning learns policies from fixed datasets without further environment interaction. A key challenge in this setting is epistemic uncertainty, arising from limited or biased data coverage, particularly when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Abhilash Reddy Chenreddy , Erick Delage

Inspired by behavioral science, we propose Behavior Learning (BL), a novel general-purpose machine learning framework that learns interpretable and identifiable optimization structures from data, ranging from single optimization problems to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenyao Ma , Yue Liang , Dongxu Li