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Related papers: Offline Policy Optimization in RL with Variance Re…

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Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds. Focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Richard Cheng , Abhinav Verma , Gabor Orosz , Swarat Chaudhuri , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick

Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Rasool Fakoor , Jonas Mueller , Kavosh Asadi , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from previously collected datasets. Recently, due to their powerful representational capabilities, diffusion models have shown significant potential as policy models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Tianle Zhang , Jiayi Guan , Lin Zhao , Yihang Li , Dongjiang Li , Zecui Zeng , Lei Sun , Yue Chen , Xuelong Wei , Lusong Li , Xiaodong He

Hierarchical policies enable strong performance in many sequential decision-making problems, such as those with high-dimensional action spaces, those requiring long-horizon planning, and settings with sparse rewards. However, learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Carolin Schmidt , Daniele Gammelli , James Harrison , Marco Pavone , Filipe Rodrigues

Primal-dual safe RL methods commonly perform iterations between the primal update of the policy and the dual update of the Lagrange Multiplier. Such a training paradigm is highly susceptible to the error in cumulative cost estimation since…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Zifan Wu , Bo Tang , Qian Lin , Chao Yu , Shangqin Mao , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Dong Wang

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Melrose Roderick , Gaurav Manek , Felix Berkenkamp , J. Zico Kolter

Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Yu Bai

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning control policies by utilizing only prior experience, without any online interaction. This can allow robots to acquire generalizable skills from large and diverse datasets, without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Aviral Kumar , Anikait Singh , Stephen Tian , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Recently, Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of various algorithms and datasets. However, these methods usually focus on algorithmic advancements, ignoring that many low-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Yirui Wang , Yang Yue , Shuicheng Yan

Offline RL algorithms aim to improve upon the behavior policy that produces the collected data while constraining the learned policy to be within the support of the dataset. However, practical offline datasets often contain examples with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jianxun Wang , Grant C. Forbes , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , David L. Roberts

Scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to recommender systems (RS) is promising since maximizing the expected cumulative rewards for RL agents meets the objective of RS, i.e., improving customers' long-term satisfaction. A key approach to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Kuangqi Zhou , Lanqing Li , Xueqian Wang , Bo Yuan , Peilin Zhao

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are applied to learn performant, well-generalizing policies when provided with a static dataset of interactions. Many recent approaches to offline RL have seen substantial success, but with one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Padmanaba Srinivasan , William Knottenbelt

We review basic concepts of convex duality, focusing on the very general and supremely useful Fenchel-Rockafellar duality. We summarize how this duality may be applied to a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) settings, including policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Ofir Nachum , Bo Dai

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

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianxiong Li , Honglei Yin

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms still lack trust in practice due to the risk that the learned policy performs worse than the original policy that generated the dataset or behaves in an unexpected way that is unfamiliar to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Thomas Runkler

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms hold the promise of enabling data-driven RL methods that do not require costly or dangerous real-world exploration and benefit from large pre-collected datasets. This in turn can facilitate…

With the advent of large datasets, offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising framework for learning good decision-making policies without the need to interact with the real environment. However, offline RL requires the dataset to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Yicheng Luo , Zhengyao Jiang , Samuel Cohen , Edward Grefenstette , Marc Peter Deisenroth

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn from historical data without requiring (costly) access to the environment. To facilitate offline RL research, we previously introduced NeoRL, which highlighted that datasets from real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Songyi Gao , Zuolin Tu , Rong-Jun Qin , Yi-Hao Sun , Xiong-Hui Chen , Yang Yu