Occupancy ratios correct distribution shift in offline reinforcement learning and are central to off-policy evaluation. Existing primal-dual and minimax methods typically estimate these ratios by enforcing occupancy-balance moments over a critic class.
arXiv:2607. 05375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Occupancy ratios correct distribution shift in offline reinforcement learning and are central to off-policy evaluation.
By Lars van der Laan, Nathan Kallus
arXiv:2603. 09344v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift.
By Hongqiang Lin, Zhenghui Fu, Weihao Tang, Pengfei Wang, Yiding Sun, Qixian Huang, Dongxu Zhang
arXiv:2605. 12410v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose and analyze a model-based bootstrap for transition kernels in finite controlled Markov chains (CMCs) with possibly nonstationary or history-dependent control policies, a setting that arises naturally in offline reinforcement learning (RL) when the behavior policy generating the data is unknown.
By Ziwei Su, Imon Banerjee, Diego Klabjan
arXiv:2607. 26509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control typically rely on neural value function approximation to guide policy improvement.
By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Ziqi Xie, Guojie Chen, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao
arXiv:2607. 02288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While pessimism counteracts overestimation bias in offline reinforcement learning (RL), being overly conservative has been associated with hindering certain forms of generalization.
By Max Weltevrede, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Wendelin B\"ohmer
arXiv:2608. 01130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A broad range of models face the mismatch where they are updated through trajectory losses but are evaluated by downstream task reward.
By Yuyang Shen
arXiv:2605. 05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy.
By Dillon Sandhu, Ronald Parr
arXiv:2506. 07040v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study model-free methods for distributionally robust infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs).
By Yang Xu, Swetha Ganesh, Vaneet Aggarwal
arXiv:2607. 05903v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present K-ABENA (K-Adaptive Backpropagation with Error-based N-exclusion Algorithm), a selective gradient computation framework that reduces per-iteration training cost by excluding a fraction of low-loss ("minor") observations from the backward pass.
By Jean-Francois Bonbhel
Discounted exponential utility provides a principled criterion for risk-sensitive sequential decision-making, but its nonlinear structure complicates reinforcement learning. A recent work \citep{thoppe2026reinforcement} addressed this difficulty by introducing a Bellman-compatible surrogate and two model-free fixed-point algorithms for optimizing it over stationary policies.
arXiv:2506. 06178v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems.
By Alessandro Montenegro, Federico Mansutti, Marco Mussi, Matteo Papini, Alberto Maria Metelli