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We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic target policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with continuous action spaces. While it is common to use importance sampling for OPE, it suffers from high variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Haanvid Lee , Tri Wahyu Guntara , Jongmin Lee , Yung-Kyun Noh , Kee-Eung Kim

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a target policy with data generated by other policies. Most previous OPE methods focus on precisely estimating the true performance of a policy. We observe that in many applications, (1) the end…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Yue Jin , Yue Zhang , Tao Qin , Xudong Zhang , Jian Yuan , Houqiang Li , Tie-Yan Liu

Designing a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to approximate a human's unobservable reward function requires assuming, implicitly or explicitly, a model of human preferences. A preference model that poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , W. Bradley Knox , Serena Booth , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward model from human preference data and then optimizes a policy to favor preferred responses, has emerged as a central paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-29 Gen Li , Yuling Yan

In real-world recommender systems and search engines, optimizing ranking decisions to present a ranked list of relevant items is critical. Off-policy evaluation (OPE) for ranking policies is thus gaining a growing interest because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-04 Haruka Kiyohara , Yuta Saito , Tatsuya Matsuhiro , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto

In this paper, we investigate the problem of offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) with human feedback where feedback is available in the form of preference between trajectory pairs rather than explicit rewards. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Nathan Kallus , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

This work tackles the problem of overoptimization in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a prevalent technique for aligning models with human preferences. RLHF relies on reward or preference models trained on \emph{fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Dhawal Gupta , Adam Fisch , Christoph Dann , Alekh Agarwal

Reinforcement learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns from preference signals, while standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly learns from reward signals. Preferences arguably contain less information than rewards, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Yuanhao Wang , Qinghua Liu , Chi Jin

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a powerful framework for training robotic agents using pre-collected, suboptimal datasets, eliminating the need for costly, time-consuming, and potentially hazardous online interactions. This is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tung M. Luu , Donghoon Lee , Younghwan Lee , Chang D. Yoo

In this paper, we provide two new stable online algorithms for the problem of prediction in reinforcement learning, \emph{i.e.}, estimating the value function of a model-free Markov reward process using the linear function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Ajin George Joseph , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Yuta Saito , Thorsten Joachims

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a prevalent approach to align AI systems with human values by learning rewards from human preference data. Due to various reasons, however, such data typically takes the form of rankings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Ilgee Hong , Zichong Li , Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Haoming Jiang , Tianbao Yang , Tuo Zhao

As large language models increasingly drive real-world applications, aligning them with human values becomes paramount. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique, translating preference data into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Yunzhen Feng , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Kunhao Zheng , Julia Kempe , Yaqi Duan

When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Hoang M. Le , Cameron Voloshin , Yisong Yue

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can help avoid sophisticated reward designs and align better with human intentions, showing great promise in various real-world applications. However, obtaining human feedback for preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Yihuan Mao , Jin Zhang , Chengjie Wu , Yuhua Jiang , Xu Yang , Runpeng Xie , Yi Fan , Bo Liu , Yang Gao , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning refers to the process of learning policies from fixed datasets, without requiring additional environment interaction. However, it often relies on well-defined reward functions, which are difficult and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Xiancheng Gao , Yufeng Shi , Wengang Zhou , Houqiang Li

To improve human-preference alignment training, current research has developed numerous preference datasets consisting of preference pairs labeled as "preferred" or "dispreferred". These preference pairs are typically used to encode human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Chenglong Wang , Yang Gan , Yifu Huo , Yongyu Mu , Qiaozhi He , Murun Yang , Tong Xiao , Chunliang Zhang , Tongran Liu , Jingbo Zhu

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

In reinforcement learning, off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the expected return of an evaluation policy given a fixed dataset that was collected by running one or more different policies. One of the more empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna