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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna

Offline Reinforcement Learning has attracted much interest in solving the application challenge for traditional reinforcement learning. Offline reinforcement learning uses previously-collected datasets to train agents without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Chen Zhao , Kai Xing Huang , Chun yuan

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

In recent years we have witnessed a growth in mathematics for deep learning, which has been used to solve inverse problems of partial differential equations (PDEs). However, most deep learning-based inversion methods either require paired…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-04-23 Enze Jiang , Jishen Peng , Zheng Ma , Xiong-Bin Yan

Predicting potential outcomes of interventions from observational data is crucial for decision-making in medicine, but the task is challenging due to the fundamental problem of causal inference. Existing methods are largely limited to point…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Yuchen Ma , Valentyn Melnychuk , Jonas Schweisthal , Stefan Feuerriegel

Offline reinforcement learning struggles with distributional shift and constrained performance due to static dataset limitations, while online RL demands prohibitive environment interactions. The recent advent of hybrid offline-to-online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Qisai Liu , Zhanhong Jiang , Joshua Russell Waite , Aditya Balu , Cody Fleming , Soumik Sarkar

Many practical applications of reinforcement learning constrain agents to learn from a fixed batch of data which has already been gathered, without offering further possibility for data collection. In this paper, we demonstrate that due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Scott Fujimoto , David Meger , Doina Precup

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of an evaluation policy, $\pi_e$, using a fixed dataset, $\mathcal{D}$, collected by one or more policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna

We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-03 Sofia Ek , Dave Zachariah , Fredrik D. Johansson , Petre Stoica

In reinforcement learning (RL), function approximation errors are known to easily lead to the Q-value overestimations, thus greatly reducing policy performance. This paper presents a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Jingliang Duan , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yangang Ren , Bo Cheng

With the development of big data and machine learning, privacy concerns have become increasingly critical, especially when handling heterogeneous datasets containing sensitive personal information. Differential privacy provides a rigorous…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-08 Ziliang Shen , Caixing Wang , Shaoli Wang , Yibo Yan

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-28 Xiaohong Chen , Zhengling Qi

Popular reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms tend to produce a unimodal policy distribution, which weakens the expressiveness of complicated policy and decays the ability of exploration. The diffusion probability model is powerful to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Long Yang , Zhixiong Huang , Fenghao Lei , Yucun Zhong , Yiming Yang , Cong Fang , Shiting Wen , Binbin Zhou , Zhouchen Lin

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

Short- and long-term outcomes of an algorithm often differ, with damaging downstream effects. A known example is a click-bait algorithm, which may increase short-term clicks but damage long-term user engagement. A possible solution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Yuta Saito , Himan Abdollahpouri , Jesse Anderton , Ben Carterette , Mounia Lalmas

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Andrea Zanette , Ching-An Cheng , Alekh Agarwal

Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Omer Gottesman , Joseph Futoma , Yao Liu , Sonali Parbhoo , Leo Anthony Celi , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

On-policy reinforcement learning methods like GRPO suffer from mode collapse: they exhibit reduced solution diversity, concentrating probability mass on a single solution once discovered and ceasing exploration of alternative strategies. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Yang Li , Xinyu Fang , Shengyuan Ding , Peiji Li , Yongkang Chen , Yichuan Ma , Tianyi Lyu , Linyang Li , Dahua Lin , Qipeng Guo , Qingwen Liu , Kai Chen

We introduce off-policy distributional Q($\lambda$), a new addition to the family of off-policy distributional evaluation algorithms. Off-policy distributional Q($\lambda$) does not apply importance sampling for off-policy learning, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Yunhao Tang , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Bernardo Ávila Pires , Will Dabney

Distributionally robust policy learning aims to find a policy that performs well under the worst-case distributional shift, and yet most existing methods for robust policy learning consider the worst-case joint distribution of the covariate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyuan Wang , Zhimei Ren , Ruohan Zhan , Zhengyuan Zhou