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While Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods have demonstrated strong performance in online settings, its success in offline scenarios remains limited. We hypothesize that a key limitation of existing offline DRL methods lies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Ryo Iwaki , Takayuki Osogami

We study offline dynamic pricing when historical data provide incomplete coverage of the price space such that some candidate prices, including the optimal one, may be entirely unobserved. This setting is common in practice and is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-25 Zeyu Bian , Lan Wang , Zhengling Qi

We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning with model-based control, whose goal is to learn a dynamics model from the experience replay and obtain a pessimism-oriented agent under the learned model. Current model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Ruizhen Liu , Dazhi Zhong , Zhicong Chen

In this paper, we study distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (robust offline RL), which seeks to find an optimal policy purely from an offline dataset that can perform well in perturbed environments. In specific, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Jose Blanchet , Miao Lu , Tong Zhang , Han Zhong

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy based on a dataset collected a priori. Due to the lack of further interactions with the environment, offline RL suffers from the insufficient coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Ying Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

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

We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Han Zhong , Zhongren Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Csaba Szepesvári

Offline RL algorithms must account for the fact that the dataset they are provided may leave many facets of the environment unknown. The most common way to approach this challenge is to employ pessimistic or conservative methods, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-06 Dibya Ghosh , Anurag Ajay , Pulkit Agrawal , Sergey Levine

Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

Many advances that have improved the robustness and efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can, in one way or another, be understood as introducing additional objectives or constraints in the policy optimization step.…

This paper introduces a novel causal framework for multi-stage decision-making in natural language action spaces where outcomes are only observed after a sequence of actions. While recent approaches like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Bohan Zhang , Yixin Wang , Paramveer S. Dhillon

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Sukesh Subaharan

Parameter tuning for robotic systems is a time-consuming and challenging task that often relies on domain expertise of the human operator. Moreover, existing learning methods are not well suited for parameter tuning for many reasons…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-10 Maegan Tucker , Kejun Li , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames

The proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm stands as one of the most prosperous methods in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical understanding of PPO remains deficient. Specifically, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Han Zhong , Tong Zhang

Standard deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aims to maximize expected reward, considering collected experiences equally in formulating a policy. This differs from human decision-making, where gains and losses are valued differently and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Jared Markowitz , Ryan W. Gardner , Ashley Llorens , Raman Arora , I-Jeng Wang

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown significant promise for sequential portfolio optimization tasks, such as stock trading, where the objective is to maximize cumulative returns while minimizing risks using historical data. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Haochen Yuan , Minting Pan , Yunbo Wang , Siyu Gao , Philip S. Yu , Xiaokang Yang

We study worst-case guarantees on the expected return of fixed-dataset policy optimization algorithms. Our core contribution is a unified conceptual and mathematical framework for the study of algorithms in this regime. This analysis…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Jacob Buckman , Carles Gelada , Marc G. Bellemare

Deep reinforcement learning agents frequently suffer from premature convergence, where early entropy collapse causes the policy to discard exploratory behaviors before discovering globally optimal strategies. We introduce Optimistic Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mai Pham , Vikrant Vaze , Peter Chin