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We study the offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) problem, where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP) using the data coming from a policy $\mu$. In particular, we consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

We investigate robustness to strong data corruption in offline sparse reinforcement learning (RL). In our setting, an adversary may arbitrarily perturb a fraction of the collected trajectories from a high-dimensional but sparse Markov…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Nam Phuong Tran , Andi Nika , Goran Radanovic , Long Tran-Thanh , Debmalya Mandal

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) considers problems where learning is performed using only previously collected samples and is helpful for the settings in which collecting new data is costly or risky. In model-based offline RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Mustafa O. Karabag , Ufuk Topcu

In this paper, we study the offline RL problem with linear function approximation. Our main structural assumption is that the MDP has low inherent Bellman error, which stipulates that linear value functions have linear Bellman backups with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Ruosong Wang , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade

The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

Recent advances have significantly improved our understanding of the sample complexity of learning in average-reward Markov decision processes (AMDPs) under the generative model. However, much less is known about the constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Yukuan Wei , Xudong Li , Lin F. Yang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Tianhe Yu , Garrett Thomas , Lantao Yu , Stefano Ermon , James Zou , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn , Tengyu Ma

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

Reinforcement learning with outcome-based feedback faces a fundamental challenge: when rewards are only observed at trajectory endpoints, how do we assign credit to the right actions? This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Fan Chen , Zeyu Jia , Alexander Rakhlin , Tengyang Xie

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

We study the sample complexity of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) under a generative model. For weakly communicating MDPs, we establish the complexity bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) we have no opportunity to explore so we must make assumptions that the data is sufficient to guide picking a good policy, taking the form of assuming some coverage, realizability, Bellman completeness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Masatoshi Uehara , Nathan Kallus , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

We study the sample complexity of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) under a generative model. We establish the complexity bound $\widetilde{O}\left(SA\frac{H}{\varepsilon^2}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Tongzheng Ren , Jialian Li , Bo Dai , Simon S. Du , Sujay Sanghavi

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

We present the first finite-sample analysis of policy evaluation in robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Prior work in this setting have established only asymptotic convergence guarantees, leaving open the question of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We consider a challenging theoretical problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL): obtaining sample-efficiency guarantees with a dataset lacking sufficient coverage, under only realizability-type assumptions for the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang