English
Related papers

Related papers: Trajectory-Aware Eligibility Traces for Off-Policy…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms often require careful hyperparameter tuning. Before deployment, we need to select amongst a set of candidate policies. However, there is limited understanding about the fundamental limits of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Vincent Liu , Prabhat Nagarajan , Andrew Patterson , Martha White

Data selection is a critical aspect of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Current data selection methods are largely heuristic-based, lacking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Erle Zhu , Dazhi Jiang , Yuan Wang , Xujun Li , Jiale Cheng , Yuxian Gu , Yilin Niu , Aohan Zeng , Jie Tang , Minlie Huang , Hongning Wang

We present a novel off-policy loss function for learning a transition model in model-based reinforcement learning. Notably, our loss is derived from the off-policy policy evaluation objective with an emphasis on correcting distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Cameron Voloshin , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

Off-policy sampling and experience replay are key for improving sample efficiency and scaling model-free temporal difference learning methods. When combined with function approximation, such as neural networks, this combination is known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Ray Jiang , Shangtong Zhang , Veronica Chelu , Adam White , Hado van Hasselt

We consider the off-policy estimation problem of estimating the expected reward of a target policy using samples collected by a different behavior policy. Importance sampling (IS) has been a key technique to derive (nearly) unbiased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Qiang Liu , Lihong Li , Ziyang Tang , Dengyong Zhou

Bayesian policy reuse (BPR) is a general policy transfer framework for selecting a source policy from an offline library by inferring the task belief based on some observation signals and a trained observation model. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Jinmei Liu , Zhi Wang , Chunlin Chen , Daoyi Dong

A common strategy in transfer learning is few shot fine-tuning, but its success is highly dependent on the quality of samples selected as training examples. Active learning methods such as uncertainty sampling and diversity sampling can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wei Han , David Martinez , Anna Khanina , Lawrence Cavedon , Karin Verspoor

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Tingting Zhao , Hirotaka Hachiya , Voot Tangkaratt , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

Constraint inference is widely considered essential to align reinforcement learning agents with safety boundaries and operational guidelines by observing expert demonstrations. However, existing approaches typically assume homogeneous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Syed Ihtesham Hussain Shah , Floris den Hengst , Aneta Lisowska , Annette ten Teije

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xiao-Yin Liu , Guotao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Zeng-Guang Hou

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Ray Jiang , Tom Zahavy , Zhongwen Xu , Adam White , Matteo Hessel , Charles Blundell , Hado van Hasselt

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Francesco Faccio , Marcello Restelli

In this work, we consider the off-policy policy evaluation problem for contextual bandits and finite horizon reinforcement learning in the nonstationary setting. Reusing old data is critical for policy evaluation, but existing estimators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Vincent Liu , Yash Chandak , Philip Thomas , Martha White

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup