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We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of a policy from the data generated by another policy(ies). In particular, we focus on the doubly robust (DR)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Mehrdad Farajtabar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Sample efficiency is one of the most critical issues for online reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods achieve higher sample efficiency by adopting model-based methods, Q-ensemble, or better exploration mechanisms. We, instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jiafei Lyu , Le Wan , Zongqing Lu , Xiu Li

This article reviews the recent advances on the statistical foundation of reinforcement learning (RL) in the offline and low-adaptive settings. We will start by arguing why offline RL is the appropriate model for almost any real-life ML…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ming Yin , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

Off-policy learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy ($\pi$) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause…

Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Chinmaya Kausik , Yangyi Lu , Kevin Tan , Maggie Makar , Yixin Wang , Ambuj Tewari

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is crucial for assessing a target policy's impact offline before its deployment. However, achieving accurate OPE in large state spaces remains challenging. This paper studies state abstractions -- originally…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-05 Meiling Hao , Pingfan Su , Liyuan Hu , Zoltan Szabo , Qingyuan Zhao , Chengchun Shi

We revisit the classical problem of Bayesian ensembles and address the challenge of learning optimal combinations of Bayesian models in an online, continual learning setting. To this end, we reinterpret existing approaches such as Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Daniel Waxman , Fernando Llorente , Petar M. Djurić

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are typically characterized as algorithms that perform policy updates using i.i.d. trajectories collected by the agent's current policy. However, after observing only a finite number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Nicholas E. Corrado , Josiah P. Hanna

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

In this work, we consider the problem of estimating a behaviour policy for use in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation (OPE) when the true behaviour policy is unknown. Via a series of empirical studies, we demonstrate how accurate OPE is strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Aniruddh Raghu , Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant strides in various complex domains. However, identifying an effective policy via RL often necessitates extensive exploration. Imitation learning aims to mitigate this issue by using expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xuefeng Liu , Takuma Yoneda , Chaoqi Wang , Matthew R. Walter , Yuxin Chen

Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Xiaoying Zhang , Junpu Chen , Hongning Wang , Hong Xie , Yang Liu , John C. S. Lui , Hang Li

Sample efficiency is crucial for imitation learning methods to be applicable in real-world applications. Many studies improve sample efficiency by extending adversarial imitation to be off-policy regardless of the fact that these off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Mingfei Sun , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Importance sampling (IS) is a popular technique in off-policy evaluation, which re-weights the return of trajectories in the replay buffer to boost sample efficiency. However, training with IS can be unstable and previous attempts to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Chengyang Ying , Zhongkai Hao , Xinning Zhou , Hang Su , Dong Yan , Jun Zhu

This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning with a focus on behavior policy estimation for importance sampling. Prior work has shown empirically that estimating a history-dependent behavior policy can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Hongyi Zhou , Josiah P. Hanna , Jin Zhu , Ying Yang , Chengchun Shi

Personalized preference alignment for LLMs with diverse human preferences requires evaluation and alignment methods that capture pluralism. Most existing preference alignment datasets are logged under policies that differ substantially from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Chengkai Huang , Junda Wu , Zhouhang Xie , Yu Xia , Rui Wang , Tong Yu , Subrata Mitra , Julian McAuley , Lina Yao

In adaptive-bias enhanced sampling methods, a bias potential is added to the system to drive transitions between metastable states. The bias potential is a function of a few collective variables and is gradually modified according to the…

Computational Physics · Physics 2022-05-30 Michele Invernizzi , Michele Parrinello

The goal of robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn a policy that is robust against the uncertainty in model parameters. Parameter uncertainty commonly occurs in many real-world RL applications due to simulator modeling errors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-10 Han Wang , Yang Xu , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

We consider a challenging theoretical problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL): obtaining sample-efficiency guarantees with a dataset lacking sufficient coverage, under only realizability-type assumptions for the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang