Related papers: Average-DICE: Stationary Distribution Correction b…
Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation (DICE) addresses the mismatch between the stationary distribution induced by a policy and the target distribution required for reliable off-policy evaluation (OPE) and policy optimization.…
We present GradientDICE for estimating the density ratio between the state distribution of the target policy and the sampling distribution in off-policy reinforcement learning. GradientDICE fixes several problems of GenDICE (Zhang et al.,…
In many real-world reinforcement learning applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed dataset, instead of direct (online) interaction with the environment. When using this data for either evaluation or training of a new…
The recently proposed distribution correction estimation (DICE) family of estimators has advanced the state of the art in off-policy evaluation from behavior-agnostic data. While these estimators all perform some form of stationary…
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…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is one of the most fundamental problems in reinforcement learning (RL) to estimate the expected long-term payoff of a given target policy with only experiences from another behavior policy that is potentially…
We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…
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…
We consider the offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting where the agent aims to optimize the policy solely from the data without further environment interactions. In offline RL, the distributional shift becomes the primary source of…
The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…
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…
The performance of Offline reinforcement learning is significantly impacted by the issue of state distributional shift, and out-of-distribution (OOD) state correction is a popular approach to address this problem. In this paper, we propose…
Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
In this study, we investigate the DIstribution Correction Estimation (DICE) methods, an important line of work in offline reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL). DICE-based methods impose state-action-level behavior…
In the unsupervised pre-training for reinforcement learning, the agent aims to learn a prior policy for downstream tasks without relying on task-specific reward functions. We focus on state entropy maximization (SEM), where the goal is to…
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,…
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…
Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…