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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the challenge of expensive and high-risk data exploration inherent in RL by pre-training policies on vast amounts of offline data, enabling direct deployment or fine-tuning in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Thanh Nguyen , Tung M. Luu , Tri Ton , Chang D. Yoo

Offline reinforcement learning enables learning from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. The lack of environmental interactions makes the policy training vulnerable to state-action pairs far from the training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Shentao Yang , Zhendong Wang , Huangjie Zheng , Yihao Feng , Mingyuan Zhou

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

Recent work has shown that offline reinforcement learning (RL) can be formulated as a sequence modeling problem (Chen et al., 2021; Janner et al., 2021) and solved via approaches similar to large-scale language modeling. However, any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Qinqing Zheng , Amy Zhang , Aditya Grover

Generative models have emerged as a powerful class of policies for offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their ability to capture complex, multi-modal behaviors. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: slow, iterative models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xinsong Feng , Leshu Tang , Chenan Wang , Haipeng Chen

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

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…

We seek to understand what facilitates sample-efficient learning from historical datasets for sequential decision-making, a problem that is popularly known as offline reinforcement learning (RL). Further, we are interested in algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Raman Arora

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Michael Janner , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

To obtain a near-optimal policy with fewer interactions in Reinforcement Learning (RL), a promising approach involves the combination of offline RL, which enhances sample efficiency by leveraging offline datasets, and online RL, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Xiaoyu Wen , Xudong Yu , Rui Yang , Haoyuan Chen , Chenjia Bai , Zhen Wang

Recent developments in offline reinforcement learning have uncovered the immense potential of diffusion modeling, which excels at representing heterogeneous behavior policies. However, sampling from diffusion policies is considerably slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Huayu Chen , Cheng Lu , Zhengyi Wang , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Allen Nie , Yash Chandak , Christina J. Yuan , Anirudhan Badrinath , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskil

Behavior constrained policy optimization has been demonstrated to be a successful paradigm for tackling Offline Reinforcement Learning. By exploiting historical transitions, a policy is trained to maximize a learned value function while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Jiachen Li , Edwin Zhang , Ming Yin , Qinxun Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang , William Yang Wang

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods designed to handle adversarial input observations have received significant attention, motivated by RL's inherent vulnerabilities. While existing approaches have demonstrated reasonable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kosuke Nakanishi , Akihiro Kubo , Yuji Yasui , Shin Ishii

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) leverages both pre-trained offline policies and online policies trained for downstream tasks, aiming to improve data efficiency and accelerate performance enhancement. An existing approach,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 JaeYoon Kim , Junyu Xuan , Christy Liang , Farookh Hussain

Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Yu Bai

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from a static dataset, making it particularly valuable in scenarios where data collection is costly, such as robotics. A major challenge in offline RL is distributional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Motoki Omura , Yusuke Mukuta , Kazuki Ota , Takayuki Osa , Tatsuya Harada

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola