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The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-06 Xuqiao Li , Ying Yan

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Consider the following instance of the Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) problem: given the complete training logs of $N$ conventional RL agents, trained on $N$ different tasks, design a meta-agent that can quickly maximize reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Ron Dorfman , Idan Shenfeld , Aviv Tamar

Methods for learning optimal policies use causal machine learning models to create human-interpretable rules for making choices around the allocation of different policy interventions. However, in realistic policy-making contexts,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Patrick Rehill , Nicholas Biddle

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable environments poses significant challenges due to the complexity of learning under uncertainty. While additional information, such as that available in simulations, can enhance training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yueheng Li , Guangming Xie , Zongqing Lu

This paper presents a systematic study on gap-dependent sample complexity in offline reinforcement learning. Prior work showed when the density ratio between an optimal policy and the behavior policy is upper bounded (the optimal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Xinqi Wang , Qiwen Cui , Simon S. Du

Sample efficiency and exploration remain major challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL). A powerful approach that can be applied to address these issues is the inclusion of offline data, such as prior trajectories from a human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Philip J. Ball , Laura Smith , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find optimal policies in dynamic environments in order to maximize the expected total rewards by leveraging pre-collected data. Learning from heterogeneous data is one of the fundamental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Rui Miao , Babak Shahbaba , Annie Qu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Tianhe Yu , Garrett Thomas , Lantao Yu , Stefano Ermon , James Zou , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn , Tengyu Ma

We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-27 Hung Tran-The , Sunil Gupta , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh

A temporally abstract action, or an option, is specified by a policy and a termination condition: the policy guides option behavior, and the termination condition roughly determines its length. Generally, learning with longer options (like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Anna Harutyunyan , Peter Vrancx , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Ann Nowe

This paper focuses on developing Pareto-optimal estimation and policy learning to identify the most effective treatment that maximizes the total reward from both short-term and long-term effects, which might conflict with each other. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Yingrong Wang , Anpeng Wu , Haoxuan Li , Weiming Liu , Qiaowei Miao , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu , Kun Kuang

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

Recently there has been a surge of interest in operations research (OR) and the machine learning (ML) community in combining prediction algorithms and optimization techniques to solve decision-making problems in the face of uncertainty.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Utsav Sadana , Abhilash Chenreddy , Erick Delage , Alexandre Forel , Emma Frejinger , Thibaut Vidal

Algorithmic decision-making in practice must be fair for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. To achieve this, prior research has contributed various approaches that ensure fairness in machine learning predictions, while comparatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

This paper describes a purely data-driven solution to a class of sequential decision-making problems with a large number of concurrent online decisions, with applications to computing systems and operations research. We assume that while…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-02 Hardik Meisheri , Vinita Baniwal , Nazneen N Sultana , Balaraman Ravindran , Harshad Khadilkar