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We develop the first general semi-bandit algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ regret for stochastic environments and $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret for adversarial environments without knowledge of the regime or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Julian Zimmert , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei

The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained via a behavior policy. However, because the contextual bandit algorithm updates the policy based on past observations, the samples are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Masahiro Kato , Yusuke Kaneko

We study the statistical complexity of offline decision-making with function approximation, establishing (near) minimax-optimal rates for stochastic contextual bandits and Markov decision processes. The performance limits are captured by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Raman Arora

We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-07 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudik

We consider the problem of online regret minimization in linear bandits with access to prior observations (offline data) from the underlying bandit model. There are numerous applications where extensive offline data is often available, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Sushant Vijayan , Arun Suggala , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Soumyabrata Pal

The goal of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to find an optimal policy given prerecorded trajectories. Many current approaches customize existing off-policy RL algorithms, especially actor-critic algorithms in which policy evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Wonjoon Goo , Scott Niekum

Developing theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity of offline RL methods is an important step towards making data-hungry RL algorithms practically viable. Currently, most results hinge on unrealistic assumptions about the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Sunil Madhow , Dan Qiao , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

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

In this paper, we study oracle-efficient algorithms for beyond worst-case analysis of online learning. We focus on two settings. First, the smoothed analysis setting of [RST11,HRS22] where an adversary is constrained to generating samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Nika Haghtalab , Yanjun Han , Abhishek Shetty , Kunhe Yang

Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Chinmaya Kausik , Yangyi Lu , Kevin Tan , Maggie Makar , Yixin Wang , Ambuj Tewari

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy by using pre-collected datasets, to maximize cumulative rewards. However, offline reinforcement learning suffers challenges due to the distributional shift between the learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yunkai Gao , Jiaming Guo , Fan Wu , Rui Zhang

The explosion in mobile data traffic together with the ever-increasing expectations for higher quality of service call for the development of AI algorithms for wireless network optimization. In this paper, we investigate how to learn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Miguel Suau , Alexandros Agapitos , David Lynch , Derek Farrell , Mingqi Zhou , Aleksandar Milenovic

We present a novel observation about the behavior of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: on many benchmark datasets, offline RL can produce well-performing and safe policies even when trained with "wrong" reward labels, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Anqi Li , Dipendra Misra , Andrey Kolobov , Ching-An Cheng

To facilitate efficient learning, policy gradient approaches to deep reinforcement learning (RL) are typically paired with variance reduction measures and strategies for making large but safe policy changes based on a batch of experiences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Jared Markowitz , Edward W. Staley

Inverse optimization is a powerful paradigm for learning preferences and restrictions that explain the behavior of a decision maker, based on a set of external signal and the corresponding decision pairs. However, most inverse optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Chaosheng Dong , Yiran Chen , Bo Zeng

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks robust policy training against environment perturbation by modeling dynamics uncertainty, calls for function approximations when facing large state-action spaces.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Many offline reinforcement learning algorithms are underpinned by $f$-divergence regularization, but their sample complexity *defined with respect to regularized objectives* still lacks tight analyses, especially in terms of concrete data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Qingyue Zhao , Kaixuan Ji , Heyang Zhao , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Yao Liu , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskill

A recurring theme in statistical learning, online learning, and beyond is that faster convergence rates are possible for problems with low noise, often quantified by the performance of the best hypothesis; such results are known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy