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We present SoftDICE, which achieves state-of-the-art performance for imitation learning. SoftDICE fixes several key problems in ValueDICE, an off-policy distribution matching approach for sample-efficient imitation learning. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Mingfei Sun , Anuj Mahajan , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods aim to estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aishwarya Mandyam , Jason Meng , Ge Gao , Jiankai Sun , Mac Schwager , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emma Brunskill

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

Primal-dual algorithm (PDA) is a classic and popular scheme for convex-concave saddle point problems. It is universally acknowledged that the proximal terms in the subproblems about the primal and dual variables are crucial to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-24 Shuning Liu , Zexian Liu

In reinforcement learning, off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the expected return of an evaluation policy given a fixed dataset that was collected by running one or more different policies. One of the more empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction for learning policies from pre-collected datasets without requiring further interactions with the environment. However, existing methods struggle to handle out-of-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Zhepeng Cen , Zuxin Liu , Zitong Wang , Yihang Yao , Henry Lam , Ding Zhao

The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables but the behavior policy depends on latent states (Tennenholtz et al. (2020a)). Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Yash Nair , Nan Jiang

Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation~(OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-25 Kohsuke Kubota , Mitsuhiro Takahashi , Yuta Saito

An important problem that arises in reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo methods is estimating quantities defined by the stationary distribution of a Markov chain. In many real-world applications, access to the underlying transition…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-24 Ruiyi Zhang , Bo Dai , Lihong Li , Dale Schuurmans

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq

In this work, we present a new model-free and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, that is capable of finding a near-optimal policy with state-action observations from arbitrary behavior policies. Our algorithm, called the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-21 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee , Niao He

Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Tengyu Xu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Yingbin Liang

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is a central challenge for safely deploying machine learning models in the real world. Previous methods commonly rely on an OOD score derived from the overparameterized weight space, while largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Yiyou Sun , Yixuan Li

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Samin Yeasar Arnob , Doina Precup

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans

Neural ordinary differential equations (Neural ODEs) propose the idea that a sequence of layers in a neural network is just a discretisation of an ODE, and thus can instead be directly modelled by a parameterised ODE. This idea has had…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Christina Runkel , Ander Biguri , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

We study the problem of estimating the distribution of the return of a policy using an offline dataset that is not generated from the policy, i.e., distributional offline policy evaluation (OPE). We propose an algorithm called Fitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Runzhe Wu , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun

Holdout validation and hyperparameter tuning from data is a long-standing problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL). A standard framework is to use off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods to evaluate and select the policies, but OPE either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Pai Liu , Lingfeng Zhao , Shivangi Agarwal , Jinghan Liu , Audrey Huang , Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang