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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes a policy using only a fixed dataset, making it a practical approach in scenarios where interaction with the environment is costly. Due to this limitation, generalization ability is key to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 JunHyeok Oh , Byung-Jun Lee

Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Noveen Sachdeva , Lequn Wang , Dawen Liang , Nathan Kallus , Julian McAuley

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms combined with value function approximation have recently achieved impressive performance in a variety of application domains. However, the theoretical understanding of such algorithms is limited,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Botao Hao , Nevena Lazic , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Pooria Joulani , Csaba Szepesvari

Maximum inner product search (MIPS) is a crucial subroutine in machine learning, requiring the identification of key vectors that align best with a given query. We propose amortized MIPS: a learning-based approach that trains neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Theo X. Olausson , João Monteiro , Michal Klein , Marco Cuturi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically sample-inefficient, making it challenging to train and deploy RL-policies in real world robots. Even a robust policy trained in simulation requires a real-world deployment to assess their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Pulkit Katdare , Nan Jiang , Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows robots to learn from offline datasets without risky exploration. Yet, offline RL's performance often hinges on a brittle trade-off between (1) return maximization, which can push policies outside…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Hokyun Im , Andrey Kolobov , Jianlong Fu , Youngwoon Lee

Many complex real-world tasks are composed of several levels of sub-tasks. Humans leverage these hierarchical structures to accelerate the learning process and achieve better generalization. In this work, we study the inductive bias and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Yuchen Lu , Yikang Shen , Siyuan Zhou , Aaron Courville , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Chuang Gan

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Yu-Xiang Wang , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudik

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-28 Xiaohong Chen , Zhengling Qi

We study the offline reinforcement learning (RL) in the face of unmeasured confounders. Due to the lack of online interaction with the environment, offline RL is facing the following two significant challenges: (i) the agent may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zuyue Fu , Zhengling Qi , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Yanxun Xu , Michael R. Kosorok

Recent RL research has utilized reward shaping--particularly complex shaping rewards such as intrinsic motivation (IM)--to encourage agent exploration in sparse-reward environments. While often effective, ``reward hacking'' can lead to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Grant C. Forbes , Jianxun Wang , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

Offline imitation learning (IL) promises the ability to learn performant policies from pre-collected demonstrations without interactions with the environment. However, imitating behaviors fully offline typically requires numerous expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Jiaming Song , Willie Neiswanger , Stefano Ermon

Offline model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) serves as a competitive framework that can learn well-performing policies solely from pre-collected data with the help of learned dynamics models. To fully unleash the power of offline MBRL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yu-Wei Yang , Yun-Ming Chan , Wei Hung , Xi Liu , Ping-Chun Hsieh

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Yihao Feng , Tongzheng Ren , Ziyang Tang , Qiang Liu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Shu-Hai Li , Mei-Jiang Gui , Xiao-Liang Xie , Shi-Qi Liu , Shuang-Yi Wang , Zhen-Qiu Feng , Zeng-Guang Hou

Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Otmane Sakhi , Aleksei Arzhantsev , Imad Aouali , Flavian Vasile

Incorporating prior data into online reinforcement learning accelerates training but typically forces a difficult trade-off between high computational costs and long, multi-stage training pipelines. While fixed-length stabilization phases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Carlo Romeo , Girolamo Macaluso , Alessandro Sestini , Andrew D. Bagdanov

Many advances that have improved the robustness and efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can, in one way or another, be understood as introducing additional objectives or constraints in the policy optimization step.…