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Offline reinforcement learning aims to utilize datasets of previously gathered environment-action interaction records to learn a policy without access to the real environment. Recent work has shown that offline reinforcement learning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Vaneet Aggarwal

Counterfactual estimators are critical for learning and refining policies using logged data, a process known as Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE). OPE allows researchers to assess new policies without costly experiments, speeding up the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Ritam Guha , Nilavra Pathak

We propose and analyze a reinforcement learning principle that approximates the Bellman equations by enforcing their validity only along an user-defined space of test functions. Focusing on applications to model-free offline RL with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

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

Offline model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) serves as a competitive framework that can learn well-performing policies solely from pre-collected data with the help of learned dynamics models. To fully unleash the power of offline MBRL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yu-Wei Yang , Yun-Ming Chan , Wei Hung , Xi Liu , Ping-Chun Hsieh

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

The world currently offers an abundance of data in multiple domains, from which we can learn reinforcement learning (RL) policies without further interaction with the environment. RL agents learning offline from such data is possible but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Hager Radi , Josiah P. Hanna , Peter Stone , Matthew E. Taylor

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods allow us to compute the expected reward of a policy by using the logged data collected by a different policy. OPE is a viable alternative to running expensive online A/B tests: it can speed up the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Jacek Golebiowski , Philipp Schmidt , Ziawasch Abedjan , Artur Bekasov

This article introduces the theory of offline reinforcement learning in large state spaces, where good policies are learned from historical data without online interactions with the environment. Key concepts introduced include expressivity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Nan Jiang , Tengyang Xie

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

Skills or low-level policies in reinforcement learning are temporally extended actions that can speed up learning and enable complex behaviours. Recent work in offline reinforcement learning and imitation learning has proposed several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Valentin Villecroze , Harry J. Braviner , Panteha Naderian , Chris J. Maddison , Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem

Reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to transform real-world decision-making systems by enabling autonomous agents to learn from experience. Deploying RL in real-world settings, especially in the context of human-robot interaction,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Saurav Singh , Rodney Sanchez , Alexander Ororbia , Jamison Heard

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms mostly rely on being allowed to directly interact with their environment to collect millions of observations. This makes it hard to transfer their success to industrial control problems,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Thomas Runkler

We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-13 Sungee Hong , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Ranking interfaces are everywhere in online platforms. There is thus an ever growing interest in their Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), aiming towards an accurate performance evaluation of ranking policies using logged data. A de-facto approach…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-28 Haruka Kiyohara , Masatoshi Uehara , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto , Yuta Saito

Most of the policy evaluation algorithms are based on the theories of Bellman Expectation and Optimality Equation, which derive two popular approaches - Policy Iteration (PI) and Value Iteration (VI). However, multi-step bootstrapping is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Yuhui Wang , Qingyuan Wu , Pengcheng He , Xiaoyang Tan

We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE), a central and fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL), in the challenging setting of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with large observation spaces. Recent works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

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

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

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables but the behavior policy depends on latent states (Tennenholtz et al. (2020a)). Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Yash Nair , Nan Jiang