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Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is notoriously difficult in long- and infinite-horizon settings due to diminishing overlap between behavior and target policies. In this paper, we study the role of Markovian and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Offline reinforcement learning faces a significant challenge of value over-estimation due to the distributional drift between the dataset and the current learned policy, leading to learning failure in practice. The common approach is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Liting Chen , Jie Yan , Zhengdao Shao , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Saravan Rajmohan , Thomas Moscibroda , Dongmei Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of learning a performant policy from a fixed batch of data collected by following some behavior policy. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing in the offline setting since…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Jeong , Xiaoyu Wang , Michael Gimelfarb , Hyunwoo Kim , Baher Abdulhai , Scott Sanner

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find optimal policies in dynamic environments in order to maximize the expected total rewards by leveraging pre-collected data. Learning from heterogeneous data is one of the fundamental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Rui Miao , Babak Shahbaba , Annie Qu

The objective of offline RL is to learn optimal policies when a fixed exploratory demonstrations data-set is available and sampling additional observations is impossible (typically if this operation is either costly or rises ethical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Firas Jarboui , Vianney Perchet

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is one of the most fundamental problems in reinforcement learning (RL) to estimate the expected long-term payoff of a given target policy with only experiences from another behavior policy that is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Yang Hu , Tianyi Chen , Na Li , Kai Wang , Bo Dai

Most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume online access to the environment, in which one may readily interleave updates to the policy with experience collection using that policy. However, in many real-world applications such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Tatsuya Matsushima , Hiroki Furuta , Yutaka Matsuo , Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu

Distribution system state estimation (DSSE) is paramount for effective state monitoring and control. However, stochastic outputs of renewables and asynchronous streaming of multi-rate measurements in practical systems largely degrade the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-23 Ying Zhang , Junbo Zhao , Di Shi , Sungjoo Chung

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Arip Asadulaev , Maksim Bobrin , Salem Lahlou , Dmitry Dylov , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Sungee Hong , Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Recent advances in batch (offline) reinforcement learning have shown promising results in learning from available offline data and proved offline reinforcement learning to be an essential toolkit in learning control policies in a model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Ashish Kumar , Ilya Kuzovkin

Modern decision-making systems, from robots to web recommendation engines, are expected to adapt: to user preferences, changing circumstances or even new tasks. Yet, it is still uncommon to deploy a dynamically learning agent (rather than a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shengpu Tang , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Dipendra Misra , Alex Lamb , John Langford , Paul Mineiro , Sebastian Kochman

We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning where only a set of system transitions is made available for policy optimization. Following recent advances in the field, we consider a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Abdelhakim Benechehab , Albert Thomas , Balázs Kégl

In offline-to-online reinforcement learning (O2O-RL), policies are first safely trained offline using previously collected datasets and then further fine-tuned for tasks via limited online interactions. In a typical O2O-RL pipeline,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Xiaoan Xu , Shangtong Zhang , Miroslav Pajic , Yuichi Motai

In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Dongdong Li , Jiuxiang Dong

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