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Related papers: Offline RL via Feature-Occupancy Gradient Ascent

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As representation learning becomes a powerful technique to reduce sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL) in practice, theoretical understanding of its advantage is still limited. In this paper, we theoretically characterize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Yuan Cheng , Songtao Feng , Jing Yang , Hong Zhang , Yingbin Liang

In this work, we consider the problem of collaborative multi-user reinforcement learning. In this setting there are multiple users with the same state-action space and transition probabilities but with different rewards. Under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Naman Agarwal , Prateek Jain , Suhas Kowshik , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-04 Mao Hong , Zhengling Qi , Yanxun Xu

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are a special kind of multi-objective optimization problem that involves sequential decision making while satisfying the Markov property of stochastic processes. Multi-objective reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Kasmarik , Jiankun Hu

Developing theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity of offline RL methods is an important step towards making data-hungry RL algorithms practically viable. Currently, most results hinge on unrealistic assumptions about the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Sunil Madhow , Dan Qiao , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large environments often suffers from severe computational bottlenecks, as conventional regret minimization algorithms require repeated, costly calls to planning and statistical estimation oracles. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haichen Hu , Jian Qian , David Simchi-Levi

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm, called Renewal Monte Carlo (RMC), for infinite horizon Markov decision processes with a designated start state. RMC is a Monte Carlo algorithm and retains the advantages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Jayakumar Subramanian , Aditya Mahajan

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy training and deployment environments are different. To deal with this environmental perturbation, we focus on learning policies robust to uncertainties in transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar

In these notes we will tackle the problem of finding optimal policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are not fully known to us. Our intention is to slowly transition from an offline setting to an online (learning) setting.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Guillermo A. Perez

Fairness plays a crucial role in various multi-agent systems (e.g., communication networks, financial markets, etc.). Many multi-agent dynamical interactions can be cast as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While existing research has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Peizhong Ju , Arnob Ghosh , Ness B. Shroff

In this paper, we investigate the sample complexity of policy evaluation in infinite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (also known as the off-policy evaluation problem) with linear function approximation. We identify a hard regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Lin Chen , Bruno Scherrer , Peter L. Bartlett

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Algorithms developed under stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often face challenges in non-stationary environments, and infinite-horizon formulations may not directly apply to finite-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Zhizuo Chen , Theodore T. Allen

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns effective policies from a static target dataset. The performance of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms notwithstanding, it relies on the size of the target dataset, and it degrades if limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Weiqin Chen , Xinjie Zhang , Sandipan Mishra , Santiago Paternain