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We study offline-online reinforcement learning in linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under environment shift. In the offline phase, data are collected by an unknown behavior policy and may come from a mismatched environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhongjun Zhang , Sean R. Sinclair

We propose a data augmentation method for offline reinforcement learning, motivated by active positioning problems. Particularly, our approach enables the training of off-policy models from a limited number of suboptimal trajectories. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tobias Schmähling , Matthias Burkhardt , Tobias Windisch

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large environments often suffers from severe computational bottlenecks, as conventional regret minimization algorithms require repeated, costly calls to planning and statistical estimation oracles. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haichen Hu , Jian Qian , David Simchi-Levi

Most offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms return a target policy maximizing a trade-off between (1) the expected performance gain over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, and (2) the risk stemming from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Zhang-Wei Hong , Pulkit Agrawal , Rémi Tachet des Combes , Romain Laroche

A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-18 K J Prabuchandran , Tejas Bodas , Theja Tulabandhula

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL), which builds a supervised transition model with logging dataset to avoid costly interactions with the online environment, has been a promising approach for offline policy optimization. As the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Junming Yang , Xingguo Chen , Shengyuan Wang , Bolei Zhang

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Tong Yu , Lina Yao

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal control from a fixed dataset, without interactions with the system. An agent in this setting should avoid selecting actions whose consequences cannot be predicted from the…

Sequential decision problems are widely studied across many areas of science. A key challenge when learning policies from historical data - a practice commonly referred to as off-policy learning - is how to ``identify'' the impact of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Joakim Blach Andersen , Qingyuan Zhao

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

Traditional ranking systems optimize offline proxy objectives that rely on oversimplified assumptions about user behavior, often neglecting factors such as position bias and item diversity. Consequently, these models fail to improve true…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Gaurav Bhatt , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Tanmay Gangwani , Tesi Xiao , Leonid Sigal

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) have taken an iterative actor-critic approach involving off-policy evaluation. In this paper we show that simply doing one step of constrained/regularized policy improvement using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 David Brandfonbrener , William F. Whitney , Rajesh Ranganath , Joan Bruna

Online learning to rank (ONL2R) is a foundational problem for recommender systems and has received increasing attention in recent years. Among the existing approaches for ONL2R, a natural modeling architecture is the multi-armed bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Tianchen Zhou , Jia Liu , Yang Jiao , Chaosheng Dong , Yetian Chen , Yan Gao , Yi Sun

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Johannes Ackermann , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes the policy on a previously collected dataset without any interactions with the environment, yet usually suffers from the distributional shift problem. To mitigate this issue, a typical solution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Qisen Yang , Shenzhi Wang , Qihang Zhang , Gao Huang , Shiji Song

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) methods can meta-train policies that adapt to new tasks with orders of magnitude less data than standard RL, but meta-training itself is costly and time-consuming. If we can meta-train on offline data, then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Vitchyr H. Pong , Ashvin Nair , Laura Smith , Catherine Huang , Sergey Levine

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have succeeded in several challenging domains. Classic Online RL job schedulers can learn efficient scheduling strategies but often takes thousands of timesteps to explore the environment and adapt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-05 Vanamala Venkataswamy , Jake Grigsby , Andrew Grimshaw , Yanjun Qi