Related papers: Reward-Relevance-Filtered Linear Offline Reinforce…

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Medical treatments often involve a sequence of decisions, each informed by previous outcomes. This process closely aligns with reinforcement learning (RL), a framework for optimizing sequential decisions to maximize cumulative rewards under…

Most offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods suffer from the trade-off between improving the policy to surpass the behavior policy and constraining the policy to limit the deviation from the behavior policy as computing $Q$-values using…

Efficient exploration is a crucial challenge in deep reinforcement learning. Several methods, such as behavioral priors, are able to leverage offline data in order to efficiently accelerate reinforcement learning on complex tasks. However,…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) harnesses the power of massive datasets for resolving sequential decision problems. Most existing papers only discuss defending against out-of-distribution (OOD) actions while we investigate a broader…

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning with action chunking eliminates multi-step off-policy bias and enables temporally coherent exploration, but all existing methods use a fixed chunk size across every state. This is suboptimal: near…

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…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift between learning policies and datasets. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated algorithms to explicitly or implicitly…

Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…

Expressive policies based on flow-matching have been successfully applied in reinforcement learning (RL) more recently due to their ability to model complex action distributions from offline data. These algorithms build on standard policy…

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

The remarkable success of reinforcement learning (RL) heavily relies on observing the reward of every visited state-action pair. In many real world applications, however, an agent can observe only a score that represents the quality of the…

Recently, the study of linear misspecified bandits has generated intriguing implications of the hardness of learning in bandits and reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, Du et al. (2020) show that even if a learner is given linear…

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

We develop a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for improving an existing behavior policy via sparse, user-interpretable changes. Our goal is to make minimal changes while gaining as much benefit as possible. We define a minimal change…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

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…