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In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment. These are critical shortcomings for applying RL to real-world problems where…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a significant challenge of distribution shift. Model-free offline RL penalizes the Q value for out-of-distribution (OOD) data or constrains the policy closed to the behavior policy to tackle this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Xiao-Yin Liu , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Guotao Li , Hao Li , Mei-Jiang Gui , Tian-Yu Xiang , De-Xing Huang , Zeng-Guang Hou

In some applications of reinforcement learning, a dataset of pre-collected experience is already available but it is also possible to acquire some additional online data to help improve the quality of the policy. However, it may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Ruiqi Zhang , Andrea Zanette

In offline reinforcement learning, weighted regression is a common method to ensure the learned policy stays close to the behavior policy and to prevent selecting out-of-sample actions. In this work, we show that due to the limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Huayu Chen , Cheng Lu , Chengyang Ying , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maris F. L. Galesloot , Thomas Rhemrev , Nils Jansen

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

With the widespread adoption of deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has experienced a dramatic increase in popularity, scaling to previously intractable problems, such as playing complex games from pixel observations, sustaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Rafael Figueiredo Prudencio , Marcos R. O. A. Maximo , Esther Luna Colombini

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) have received rising interest due to its appealing data efficiency. The present study addresses behavior estimation, a task that lays the foundation of many offline RL algorithms. Behavior estimation aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Guoxi Zhang , Hisashi Kashima

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Yao Mu , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Qi Sun , Bingbing Nie , Bo Cheng , Baiyu Peng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Haoran Xu , Li Jiang , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan

In this paper, we study the offline RL problem with linear function approximation. Our main structural assumption is that the MDP has low inherent Bellman error, which stipulates that linear value functions have linear Bellman backups with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Ruosong Wang , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade

Motivated by the human-machine interaction such as training chatbots for improving customer satisfaction, we study human-guided human-machine interaction involving private information. We model this interaction as a two-player turn-based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-26 Zuyue Fu , Zhengling Qi , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Lan Wang

Consider the following instance of the Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) problem: given the complete training logs of $N$ conventional RL agents, trained on $N$ different tasks, design a meta-agent that can quickly maximize reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Ron Dorfman , Idan Shenfeld , Aviv Tamar

We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang