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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to learn optimal policies with access only to trajectories in a fixed dataset. Policy constraint methods formulate policy learning as an optimization problem that balances maximizing reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Padmanaba Srinivasan , William Knottenbelt

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we seek to utilize offline data to evaluate (or learn) policies in scenarios where the data are collected from a distribution that substantially differs from that of the target policy to be evaluated.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ruosong Wang , Yifan Wu , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sham M. Kakade

While much progress has been made in understanding the minimax sample complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) -- the complexity of learning on the "worst-case" instance -- such measures of complexity often do not capture the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Jamieson

Existing value function approximation methods have been successfully used in many applications, but they often lack useful a priori error bounds. We propose a new approximate bilinear programming formulation of value function approximation,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2010-06-15 Marek Petrik , Shlomo Zilberstein

The goal of the Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) task is to identify the underlying reward function and the corresponding optimal policy from a set of expert demonstrations. While most IRL algorithms' theoretical guarantees rely on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-25 Ruijia Zhang , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Representation learning is critical to the empirical and theoretical success of reinforcement learning. However, many existing methods are induced from model-learning aspects, misaligning them with the RL task in hand. This work introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ofir Nabati , Bo Dai , Shie Mannor , Guy Tennenholtz

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Gellért Weisz , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Franck Djeumou , Christian Ellis , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

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

Hybrid Reinforcement Learning (RL), where an agent learns from both an offline dataset and online explorations in an unknown environment, has garnered significant recent interest. A crucial question posed by Xie et al. (2022) is whether…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-09 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Aviral Kumar , Aurick Zhou , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

The problem of solving Markov decision processes under function approximation remains a fundamental challenge, even under linear function approximation settings. A key difficulty arises from a geometric mismatch: while the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Hyukjun Yang , Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

Most offline RL algorithms return optimal policies but do not provide statistical guarantees on desirable behaviors. This could generate reliability issues in safety-critical applications, such as in some multiagent domains where agents,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Edoardo Zorzi , Alberto Castellini , Leonidas Bakopoulos , Georgios Chalkiadakis , Alessandro Farinelli

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the absence of active exploration calls for attention on the model robustness to tackle the sim-to-real gap, where the discrepancy between the simulated and deployed environments can significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 He Wang , Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Off-policy dynamic programming (DP) techniques such as $Q$-learning have proven to be important in sequential decision-making problems. In the presence of function approximation, however, these techniques often diverge due to the absence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Zhaoyi Zhou , Chuning Zhu , Runlong Zhou , Qiwen Cui , Abhishek Gupta , Simon Shaolei Du

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

In this paper, we study the private and robust alignment of language models from a theoretical perspective by establishing upper bounds on the suboptimality gap in both offline and online settings. We consider preference labels subject to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Wenqian Weng , Yi He , Xingyu Zhou

We study offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov games, where the goal is to learn an approximate equilibrium -- such as Nash equilibrium and (Coarse) Correlated Equilibrium -- from an offline dataset pre-collected from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yuheng Zhang , Yu Bai , Nan Jiang

We study optimal procedures for estimating a linear functional based on observational data. In many problems of this kind, a widely used assumption is strict overlap, i.e., uniform boundedness of the importance ratio, which measures how…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-18 Wenlong Mou , Peng Ding , Martin J. Wainwright , Peter L. Bartlett

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