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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

Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brian Angulo , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr Panov , Konstantin Yakovlev

In Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL), agents explore the environment to learn the optimal policy while satisfying constraints. The penalty function method has recently been studied as an effective approach for handling constraints,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Shiqing Gao , Jiaxin Ding , Luoyi Fu , Xinbing Wang , Chenghu Zhou

Popular debiased estimation methods for causal inference -- such as augmented inverse propensity weighting and targeted maximum likelihood estimation -- enjoy desirable asymptotic properties like statistical efficiency and double robustness…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-16 Tiffany Tianhui Cai , Yuri Fonseca , Kaiwen Hou , Hongseok Namkoong

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Xiangyu Zhu

In this paper, we present the $\texttt{e-COP}$ algorithm, the first policy optimization algorithm for constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) in episodic (finite horizon) settings. Such formulations are applicable when there are separate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Sahil Singla

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

Ensuring AI models align with human values is essential for their safety and functionality. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) leverages human preferences to achieve this alignment. However, when preferences are sourced from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Ryan Bahlous-Boldi , Li Ding , Lee Spector , Scott Niekum

Constrained optimization provides a common framework for dealing with conflicting objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). In most of these settings, the objectives (and constraints) are expressed though the expected accumulated reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Jane H. Lee , Baturay Saglam , Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Amin Karbasi , Dionysis Kalogerias

Despite ample motivation from costly exploration and limited trajectory data, rapidly adapting to new environments with few-shot reinforcement learning (RL) can remain a challenging task, especially with respect to personalized settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Michael Zhang

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

The estimation of Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) is crucial for understanding the heterogeneity of treatment effects in clinical trials. We evaluate the performance of common methods, including causal forests and various…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-12 Oshri Machluf , Tzviel Frostig , Gal Shoham , Tomer Milo , Elad Berkman , Raviv Pryluk

In several medical decision-making problems, such as antibiotic prescription, laboratory testing can provide precise indications for how a patient will respond to different treatment options. This enables us to "fully observe" all potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Soorajnath Boominathan , Michael Oberst , Helen Zhou , Sanjat Kanjilal , David Sontag

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Tomas Brazdil , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Petr Novotny , Jiri Vahala

Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Shutong Ding , Jingya Wang , Yali Du , Ye Shi

Among on-policy reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) demonstrates is widely favored for its simplicity, numerical stability, and strong empirical performance. Standard PPO relies on surrogate objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Shunpeng Yang , Ben Liu , Hua Chen

Off-policy evaluation and learning in contextual bandits use logged interaction data to estimate and optimize the value of a target policy. Most existing methods require sufficient action overlap between the logging and target policies, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Shu Tamano

Estimating the mean counterfactual outcome under a treatment rule is a central problem in causal inference and policy evaluation. Standard estimators, including inverse probability weighting (IPW), augmented IPW (AIPW), and targeted maximum…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-06 Yichen Xu , Mark J. van der Laan