English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal Policy Learning with Observational Data in…

200 papers

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) learns optimal policies from fixed datasets, training a policy once and deploying it at inference time without further refinement. Inspired by model predictive control (MPC), we introduce an inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Rohan Deb , Stephen J. Wright , Arindam Banerjee

Learning optimal policies from historical data enables personalization in a wide variety of applications including healthcare, digital recommendations, and online education. The growing policy learning literature focuses on settings where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-17 Ruohan Zhan , Zhimei Ren , Susan Athey , Zhengyuan Zhou

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (Offline IRL) aims to recover the structure of rewards and environment dynamics that underlie observed actions in a fixed, finite set of demonstrations from an expert agent. Accurate models of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Runzhe Yang , Xingyuan Sun , Karthik Narasimhan

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-18 Connor Douglas , Joel Persson , Foster Provost

Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

When the underlying conditional density is known, conditional expectations can be computed analytically or numerically. When, however, such knowledge is not available and instead we are given a collection of training data, the goal of this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-19 George V. Moustakides

The training of autonomous agents often requires expensive and unsafe trial-and-error interactions with the environment. Nowadays several data sets containing recorded experiences of intelligent agents performing various tasks, spanning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Giorgio Angelotti , Nicolas Drougard , Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho Chanel

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy learns to maximize cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. Towards conservative strategy, current methods choose to regularize the behavior policy or learn a lower bound of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Yuhang Jiang , Shuncheng He , Xiangyang Ji

Motivated by emerging applications such as live-streaming e-commerce, promotions and recommendations, we introduce and solve a general class of non-stationary multi-armed bandit problems that have the following two features: (i) the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-23 David Simchi-Levi , Zeyu Zheng , Feng Zhu

We study the effect of stochasticity in on-policy policy optimization, and make the following four contributions. First, we show that the preferability of optimization methods depends critically on whether stochastic versus exact gradients…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Jincheng Mei , Bo Dai , Chenjun Xiao , Csaba Szepesvari , Dale Schuurmans

Distributionally robust policy learning aims to find a policy that performs well under the worst-case distributional shift, and yet most existing methods for robust policy learning consider the worst-case joint distribution of the covariate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyuan Wang , Zhimei Ren , Ruohan Zhan , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study offline reinforcement learning under a novel model called strategic MDP, which characterizes the strategic interactions between a principal and a sequence of myopic agents with private types. Due to the bilevel structure and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-24 Mengxin Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Jianqing Fan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy by using pre-collected datasets, to maximize cumulative rewards. However, offline reinforcement learning suffers challenges due to the distributional shift between the learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yunkai Gao , Jiaming Guo , Fan Wu , Rui Zhang

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

We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Siyu Chen , Yitan Wang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

We study the problem of Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (OSRL), where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy from fixed data under a cumulative cost constraint. We propose a novel OSRL approach that frames the problem as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Yassine Chemingui , Aryan Deshwal , Alan Fern , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Janardhan Rao Doppa

We study active preference learning as a framework for intuitively specifying the behaviour of autonomous robots. In active preference learning, a user chooses the preferred behaviour from a set of alternatives, from which the robot learns…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Nils Wilde , Dana Kulic , Stephen L. Smith

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents typically learn memoryless policies---policies that only consider the last observation when selecting actions. Learning memoryless policies is efficient and optimal in fully observable environments.…

Real-world decision-making systems operate in environments where state transitions depend not only on the agent's actions, but also on \textbf{exogenous factors outside its control}--competing agents, environmental disturbances, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Sourav Ganguly , Kartik Pandit , Arnob Ghosh