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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the return given a fixed dataset of agent trajectories without additional interactions with the environment. While algorithm development has progressed rapidly, significant theoretical…
Estimating the value function for a fixed policy is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning. Policy evaluation algorithms---to estimate value functions---continue to be developed, to improve convergence rates, improve stability and…
In the framework of Markov Decision Processes, off-policy learning, that is the problem of learning a linear approximation of the value function of some fixed policy from one trajectory possibly generated by some other policy. We briefly…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most vibrant research frontiers in machine learning and has been recently applied to solve a number of challenging problems. In this paper, we primarily focus on off-policy evaluation (OPE), one of…
Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…
Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…
Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or…
In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment.…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…
We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…
Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…
One of the most natural approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation is value iteration, which inductively generates approximations to the optimal value function by solving a sequence of regression problems. To…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns effective policies from a static target dataset. The performance of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms notwithstanding, it relies on the size of the target dataset, and it degrades if limited…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents can leverage batches of previously collected data to extract a reasonable control policy. An emerging issue in this offline RL setting, however, is that the bootstrapping update underlying many of our…
Off-policy prediction -- learning the value function for one policy from data generated while following another policy -- is one of the most challenging subproblems in reinforcement learning. This paper presents empirical results with…
This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…
Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…
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…
We study off-policy reinforcement learning for controlling continuous-time Markov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations and actions. We consider model-free algorithms with function approximation that learn value and advantage…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation in the multi-armed bandit model with bounded rewards, and develop minimax rate-optimal procedures under three settings. First, when the behavior policy is known, we show that the Switch…