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One of the common ways children learn is by mimicking adults. Imitation learning focuses on learning policies with suitable performance from demonstrations generated by an expert, with an unspecified performance measure, and unobserved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-15 Junzhe Zhang , Daniel Kumor , Elias Bareinboim

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Aligning large language models with pointwise absolute rewards has so far required online, on-policy algorithms such as PPO and GRPO. In contrast, simpler methods that can leverage offline or off-policy data, such as DPO and REBEL, are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Simon Matrenok , Skander Moalla , Caglar Gulcehre

Developing agents that can execute multiple skills by learning from pre-collected datasets is an important problem in robotics, where online interaction with the environment is extremely time-consuming. Moreover, manually designing reward…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the task of estimating the expected reward of a given policy based on offline data previously collected under different policies. Therefore, OPE is a key step in applying reinforcement learning to real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Yihao Feng , Ziyang Tang , Na Zhang , Qiang Liu

The prevalent use of benchmarks in current offline reinforcement learning (RL) research has led to a neglect of the imbalance of real-world dataset distributions in the development of models. The real-world offline RL dataset is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Li Jiang , Sijie Cheng , Jielin Qiu , Haoran Xu , Wai Kin Chan , Zhao Ding

We study offline constrained reinforcement learning with general function approximation in discounted constrained Markov decision processes. Prior methods either require full data coverage for evaluating intermediate policies, lack oracle…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Seokmin Ko , Ambuj Tewari , Kihyuk Hong

Many real-world problems require trading off multiple competing objectives. However, these objectives are often in different units and/or scales, which can make it challenging for practitioners to express numerical preferences over…

Pessimism is of great importance in offline reinforcement learning (RL). One broad category of offline RL algorithms fulfills pessimism by explicit or implicit behavior regularization. However, most of them only consider policy divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Chen Chen , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Chao Wang , Qianli Shen , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative reward. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative reward. We parameterize the policy controlling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Leonid Peshkin , Christian R. Shelton

We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Kailash Budhathoki , Mario Boley , Jilles Vreeken

We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Ming Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guopeng Li , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Julian F. P. Kooij

Many important quantities of interest are only partially identified from observable data: the data can limit them to a set of plausible values, but not uniquely determine them. This paper develops a unified framework for covariate-assisted…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-15 Eli Ben-Michael

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces a fundamental challenge of extrapolation errors caused by out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) employs expectile regression to achieve in-sample learning. Nevertheless, IQL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xinchen Han , Hossam Afifi , Michel Marot

We address the challenge of quantifying Bayesian uncertainty and incorporating it in offline use cases of finite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with unknown dynamics. Our approach provides a principled method to disentangle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Filippo Valdettaro , A. Aldo Faisal

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

We study offline reinforcement learning problems with a long-run average reward objective. The state-action pairs generated by any fixed behavioral policy thus follow a Markov chain, and the {\em empirical} state-action-next-state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Mengmeng Li , Daniel Kuhn , Tobias Sutter

Causal inference necessarily relies upon untestable assumptions; hence, it is crucial to assess the robustness of obtained results to violations of identification assumptions. However, such sensitivity analysis is only occasionally…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-19 Tobias Freidling , Qingyuan Zhao