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We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…
Sample-efficient offline reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation has recently been studied extensively. Much of prior work has yielded the minimax-optimal bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{K}})$, with $K$…
We offer a theoretical characterization of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning using function approximation for marginal importance weights and $q$-functions when these are estimated using recent minimax methods. Under…
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…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL purely from logged data) is an important avenue for deploying RL techniques in real-world scenarios. However, existing hyperparameter selection methods for offline RL break the offline assumption by…
We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…
We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning optimal policies in environments where direct exploration is expensive or unfeasible. However, the adoption of such policies in practice is often challenging, as they…
We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…
This work aims to study off-policy evaluation (OPE) under scenarios where two key reinforcement learning (RL) assumptions -- temporal stationarity and individual homogeneity are both violated. To handle the ``double inhomogeneities", we…
Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…
Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…
Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…
This paper studies the problem of learning an unknown function $f$ from given data about $f$. The learning problem is to give an approximation $\hat f$ to $f$ that predicts the values of $f$ away from the data. There are numerous settings…
Monotonic policy improvement and off-policy learning are two main desirable properties for reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, by lower bounding the performance difference of two policies, we show that the monotonic policy…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been a key driver of recent progress in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models, but it is typically trained in a low-staleness, near-on-policy regime…
Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy…