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Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most vibrant research frontiers in machine learning and has been recently applied to solve a number of challenging problems. In this paper, we primarily focus on off-policy evaluation (OPE), one of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-14 Masatoshi Uehara , Chengchun Shi , Nathan Kallus

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-07-23 Mert Demirer , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Greg Lewis , Victor Chernozhukov

Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng , Keilung Choy

For reinforcement learning on complex stochastic systems where many factors dynamically impact the output trajectories, it is desirable to effectively leverage the information from historical samples collected in previous iterations to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel

Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) faces challenges with sample inefficiency because of its reliance on sufficient on-policy data to evaluate the performance of the current policy during reward function updates. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Yilei Chen , Vittorio Giammarino , James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from previously collected datasets. Recently, due to their powerful representational capabilities, diffusion models have shown significant potential as policy models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Tianle Zhang , Jiayi Guan , Lin Zhao , Yihang Li , Dongjiang Li , Zecui Zeng , Lei Sun , Yue Chen , Xuelong Wei , Lusong Li , Xiaodong He

In this work, we take a fresh look at some old and new algorithms for off-policy, return-based reinforcement learning. Expressing these in a common form, we derive a novel algorithm, Retrace($\lambda$), with three desired properties: (1) it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-09 Rémi Munos , Tom Stepleton , Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare

Offline reinforcement learning (RL purely from logged data) is an important avenue for deploying RL techniques in real-world scenarios. However, existing hyperparameter selection methods for offline RL break the offline assumption by…

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Xiaoying Zhang , Junpu Chen , Hongning Wang , Hong Xie , Yang Liu , John C. S. Lui , Hang Li

The recent development of reinforcement learning (RL) has boosted the adoption of online RL for wireless radio resource management (RRM). However, online RL algorithms require direct interactions with the environment, which may be…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Kun Yang , Cong Shen , Jing Yang , Shu-ping Yeh , Jerry Sydir

We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn the optimal policy from a fixed dataset generated by behavior policies without additional environment interactions. One common challenge that arises in this setting is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Songyuan Zhang , Oswin So , H. M. Sabbir Ahmad , Eric Yang Yu , Matthew Cleaveland , Mitchell Black , Chuchu Fan

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Chengxing Jia , Fuxiang Zhang , Yi-Chen Li , Chen-Xiao Gao , Xu-Hui Liu , Lei Yuan , Zongzhang Zhang , Yang Yu

Off-policy reinforcement learning aims to leverage experience collected from prior policies for sample-efficient learning. However, in practice, commonly used off-policy approximate dynamic programming methods based on Q-learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Aviral Kumar , Justin Fu , George Tucker , Sergey Levine