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Off-policy learning (OPL) in contextual bandits aims to learn a decision-making policy that maximizes the target rewards by using only historical interaction data collected under previously developed policies. Unfortunately, when rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Rikiya Takehi , Masahiro Asami , Kosuke Kawakami , Yuta Saito

A decision maker typically (i) incorporates training data to learn about the relative effectiveness of treatments, and (ii) chooses an implementation mechanism that implies an ``optimal'' predicted outcome distribution according to some…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-29 Anders Bredahl Kock , David Preinerstorfer

We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Tomas Kocak , Gergely Neu , Michal Valko , Remi Munos

Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Da Xu , Yuting Ye , Chuanwei Ruan , Bo Yang

We address the problem of causal effect estimation in the presence of unobserved confounding, but where proxies for the latent confounder(s) are observed. We propose two kernel-based methods for nonlinear causal effect estimation in this…

In this paper, we consider non-convex optimization problems under \textit{unknown} yet safety-critical constraints. Such problems naturally arise in a variety of domains including robotics, manufacturing, and medical procedures, where it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Mohammad Fereydounian , Zebang Shen , Aryan Mokhtari , Amin Karbasi , Hamed Hassani

Despite notable successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the prevalent use of an online learning paradigm prevents its widespread adoption, especially in hazardous or costly scenarios. Offline RL has emerged as an alternative solution,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Minjae Cho , Jonathan P. How , Chuangchuang Sun

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks robust policy training against environment perturbation by modeling dynamics uncertainty, calls for function approximations when facing large state-action spaces.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Autonomous driving involves multiple, often conflicting objectives such as safety, efficiency, and comfort. In reinforcement learning (RL), these objectives are typically combined through weighted summation, which collapses their relative…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Ahmed Abouelazm , Jonas Michel , Daniel Bogdoll , Philip Schörner , J. Marius Zöllner

Recent Offline Reinforcement Learning methods have succeeded in learning high-performance policies from fixed datasets of experience. A particularly effective approach learns to first identify and then mimic optimal decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Jake Grigsby , Yanjun Qi

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

The field of quickest change detection (QCD) focuses on the design and analysis of online algorithms that estimate the time at which a significant event occurs. In this paper, design and analysis are cast in a Bayesian framework, where QCD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Austin Cooper , Sean Meyn

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

Imitation learning from demonstrations usually suffers from the confounding effects of unmeasured variables (i.e., unmeasured confounders) on the states and actions. If ignoring them, a biased estimation of the policy would be entailed. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Yan Zeng , Shenglan Nie , Feng Xie , Libo Huang , Peng Wu , Zhi Geng

On a variety of complex decision-making tasks, from doctors prescribing treatment to judges setting bail, machine learning algorithms have been shown to outperform expert human judgments. One complication, however, is that it is often…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-05-07 Jongbin Jung , Ravi Shroff , Avi Feller , Sharad Goel

This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Inspired by the two-way fixed effects regression model widely used in the panel data literature, we propose a two-way unmeasured confounding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Shuguang Yu , Shuxing Fang , Ruixin Peng , Zhengling Qi , Fan Zhou , Chengchun Shi

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning seeks to train agents to reach specified goals from previously collected trajectories. Scaling that promises to long-horizon tasks remains challenging, notably due to compounding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Anthony Kobanda , Waris Radji , Mathieu Petitbois , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Rémy Portelas