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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

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

The goal of an offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is to learn optimal polices using historical (offline) data, without access to the environment for online exploration. One of the main challenges in offline RL is the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

We introduce an offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that explicitly clones a behavior policy to constrain value learning. In offline RL, it is often important to prevent a policy from selecting unobserved actions, since the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Wonjoon Goo , Scott Niekum

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

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…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected data. However, it faces challenges of distributional shift, where the learned policy may encounter unseen scenarios not covered in the offline data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jin Zhu , Xin Zhou , Jiaang Yao , Gholamali Aminian , Omar Rivasplata , Simon Little , Lexin Li , Chengchun Shi

Existing theoretical studies on offline reinforcement learning (RL) mostly consider a dataset sampled directly from the target task. In practice, however, data often come from several heterogeneous but related sources. Motivated by this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-16 Chengshuai Shi , Wei Xiong , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

Proximal policy optimization and trust region policy optimization (PPO and TRPO) with actor and critic parametrized by neural networks achieve significant empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, due to nonconvexity, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown effective in domains where the agent can learn policies by actively interacting with its operating environment. However, if we change the RL scheme to offline setting where the agent can only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the key driver for post-training complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet online RL introduces significant instability and computational overhead. Offline RL offers a compelling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Minjae Oh , Yunho Choi , Dongmin Choi , Yohan Jo

Offline reinforcement learning enables learning from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. The lack of environmental interactions makes the policy training vulnerable to state-action pairs far from the training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Shentao Yang , Zhendong Wang , Huangjie Zheng , Yihao Feng , Mingyuan Zhou

Policy mirror descent (PMD) provides a principled framework for reinforcement learning (RL) by iteratively solving KL-regularized policy improvement subproblems. While this approach has been adopted in training advanced LLMs such as Kimi…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Zhenghao Xu , Qin Lu , Changlong Yu , Tuo Zhao

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wenye Li , Hongxu Chen , Jiacai Liu , Ke Wei

With the widespread adoption of deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has experienced a dramatic increase in popularity, scaling to previously intractable problems, such as playing complex games from pixel observations, sustaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Rafael Figueiredo Prudencio , Marcos R. O. A. Maximo , Esther Luna Colombini

We consider the offline reinforcement learning problem, where the aim is to learn a decision making policy from logged data. Offline RL -- particularly when coupled with (value) function approximation to allow for generalization in large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

Offline reinforcement learning proposes to learn policies from large collected datasets without interacting with the physical environment. These algorithms have made it possible to learn useful skills from data that can then be deployed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Samarth Sinha , Ajay Mandlekar , Animesh Garg

This work studies the challenge of aligning large language models (LLMs) with offline preference data. We focus on alignment by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in particular. While popular preference optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Xiang Ji , Sanjeev Kulkarni , Mengdi Wang , Tengyang Xie