Related papers: PERRY: Policy Evaluation with Confidence Intervals…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…
In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature…
Offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) proficiently allows an agent to tackle novel tasks while solely relying on a static dataset. For precise and efficient task identification, existing OMRL research suggests learning separate task…
Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy…
Training practical agents usually involve offline and online reinforcement learning (RL) to balance the policy's performance and interaction costs. In particular, online fine-tuning has become a commonly used method to correct the erroneous…
Estimating the value function for a fixed policy is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning. Policy evaluation algorithms---to estimate value functions---continue to be developed, to improve convergence rates, improve stability and…
Using state-level opioid overdose mortality data from 1999-2016, we simulated four time-varying treatment scenarios, which correspond to real-world policy dynamics (ramp up, ramp down, temporary and inconsistent). We then evaluated seven…
Offline reinforcement learning algorithms often require careful hyperparameter tuning. Before deployment, we need to select amongst a set of candidate policies. However, there is limited understanding about the fundamental limits of this…
Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…
Consider the problem of estimating average treatment effects when a large number of covariates are used to adjust for possible confounding through outcome regression and propensity score models. The conventional approach of model building…
We study how to improve large foundation vision-language-action (VLA) systems through online reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world settings. Central to this process is the value function, which provides learning signals to guide VLA…
This paper introduces SCOPE-RL, a comprehensive open-source Python software designed for offline reinforcement learning (offline RL), off-policy evaluation (OPE), and selection (OPS). Unlike most existing libraries that focus solely on…
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…
We show that the popular reinforcement learning (RL) strategy of estimating the state-action value (Q-function) by minimizing the mean squared Bellman error leads to a regression problem with confounding, the inputs and output noise being…
We study the novel problem of future off-policy evaluation (F-OPE) and learning (F-OPL) for estimating and optimizing the future value of policies in non-stationary environments, where distributions vary over time. In e-commerce…
Hybrid RL is the setting where an RL agent has access to both offline data and online data by interacting with the real-world environment. In this work, we propose a new hybrid RL algorithm that combines an on-policy actor-critic method…
Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…