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Related papers: Towards Optimal Offline Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find optimal policies in dynamic environments in order to maximize the expected total rewards by leveraging pre-collected data. Learning from heterogeneous data is one of the fundamental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Rui Miao , Babak Shahbaba , Annie Qu

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

Traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods predominantly operate in a batch-constrained setting. This confines the algorithms to a specific state-action distribution present in the dataset, reducing the effects of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-16 Charles A. Hepburn , Yue Jin , Giovanni Montana

Addressing such diverse ends as safety alignment with human preferences, and the efficiency of learning, a growing line of reinforcement learning research focuses on risk functionals that depend on the entire distribution of returns. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Audrey Huang , Liu Leqi , Zachary Chase Lipton , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo

The problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution from its samples is a fundamental tenet of statistical learning. Over the past decade, it attracted significant research effort and has been solved for a variety of divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Yi Hao , Alon Orlitsky , Venkatadheeraj Pichapati

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines a sample-efficient learning paradigm, where a policy is learned from static and previously collected datasets without additional interaction with the environment. The major obstacle to offline RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Yunfan Zhou , Xijun Li , Qingyu Qu

We propose a novel distributionally robust $Q$-learning algorithm for the non-tabular case accounting for continuous state spaces where the state transition of the underlying Markov decision process is subject to model uncertainty. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chung I Lu , Julian Sester , Aijia Zhang

Data acquisition efficiency is a central challenge in deploying reinforcement learning in business and healthcare operations, where interactions are costly, slow, and often involve humans in the loop. This paper develops a unified large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Mingjie Hu , Jian-Qiang Hu , Enlu Zhou

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang

We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

We consider an agent who is involved in a Markov decision process and receives a vector of outcomes every round. Her objective is to maximize a global concave reward function on the average vectorial outcome. The problem models applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-17 Wang Chi Cheung

We study off-policy evaluation and learning from sequential data in a structured class of Markov decision processes that arise from repeated interactions with an exogenous sequence of arrivals with contexts, which generate unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Nathan Kallus , Angela Zhou

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-02 Yuhan Li , Eugene Han , Yifan Hu , Wenzhuo Zhou , Zhengling Qi , Yifan Cui , Ruoqing Zhu

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods strike a balance between exploration and exploitation by conservative value estimation -- penalizing values of unseen states and actions. Model-free methods penalize values at all unseen actions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Nirbhay Modhe , Qiaozi Gao , Ashwin Kalyan , Dhruv Batra , Govind Thattai , Gaurav Sukhatme

We consider the problem of steering a system with unknown, stochastic dynamics to satisfy a rich, temporally layered task given as a signal temporal logic formula. We represent the system as a Markov decision process in which the states are…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-10-23 Austin Jones , Derya Aksaray , Zhaodan Kong , Mac Schwager , Calin Belta