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Related papers: POTEC: Off-Policy Learning for Large Action Spaces…

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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, particularly in the experience replay setting now commonly used with deep neural networks. Classically, off-policy estimation bias is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Nikos Karampatziakis , John Langford , Paul Mineiro

One critical prerequisite for the deployment of reinforcement learning systems in the real world is the ability to reliably detect situations on which the agent was not trained. Such situations could lead to potential safety risks when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Andreas Sedlmeier , Robert Müller , Steffen Illium , Claudia Linnhoff-Popien

Reinforcement learning (RL) in low-data and risk-sensitive domains requires performant and flexible deployment policies that can readily incorporate constraints during deployment. One such class of policies are the semi-parametric H-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Harshit Sikchi , Wenxuan Zhou , David Held

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

The dynamic portfolio optimization problem in finance frequently requires learning policies that adhere to various constraints, driven by investor preferences and risk. We motivate this problem of finding an allocation policy within a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Nymisha Bandi , Theja Tulabandhula

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

In this work, we present a methodology that enables an agent to make efficient use of its exploratory actions by autonomously identifying possible objectives in its environment and learning them in parallel. The identification of objectives…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-11 Thommen George Karimpanal , Erik Wilhelm

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Policy learning algorithms are widely used in areas such as personalized medicine and advertising to develop individualized treatment regimes. However, most methods force a decision even when predictions are uncertain, which is risky in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Ayush Sawarni , Jikai Jin , Justin Whitehouse , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Thomas Spooner , Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh

Offline reinforcement learning methods typically enforce strict constraints to ensure safety; yet this rigidity often prevents the discovery of optimal behaviors outside the immediate support of the behavior policy. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yifei Chen , Shaoqin Zhu , Xiaoqiang Ji

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Tianbing Xu

Parameterized movement primitives have been extensively used for imitation learning of robotic tasks. However, the high-dimensionality of the parameter space hinders the improvement of such primitives in the reinforcement learning (RL)…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Samuele Tosatto , Georgia Chalvatzaki , Jan Peters

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…

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan