arXiv AI

Beyond State-Wise Mirror Descent: Offline Policy Optimization with Parametric Policies

The paper extends theoretical guarantees for offline reinforcement learning to parameterized policy classes over large or continuous action spaces, overcoming limitations of prior algorithms that required finite action sets and state‑wise mirror descent. By addressing contextual coupling and linking mirror descent to natural policy gradients, the authors provide new analyses, algorithmic insights, and a surprising connection between offline RL and imitation learning.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Fully Offline Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2505. 22442v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline RL (ORL) promises safe and sample-efficient deployment but existing methods rely on undocumented online interactions for hyperparameter tuning and lack reliable fully offline estimates of initial online performance.

By Mattie Fellows, Clarisse Wibault, Uljad Berdica, Johannes Forkel, Maike Osborne, Jakob N. Foerster
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Higher-Order Action Supervision Makes A Strong Policy Class

The paper proposes a new loss scheme that simultaneously supervises zeroth- and first-order actions to improve policy performance and control robustness in data-driven decision-making methods such as imitation learning and reinforcement learning. The approach provides formal theoretical guarantees, works with any off-the-shelf policy model, and can be added as a lightweight plug‑and‑play module to existing offline RL frameworks. Experiments on OGBench and D4RL show significant gains in performance, robustness, and out‑of‑distribution generalization, especially in low‑data settings.

By Peng Cheng, Yunxian Hou, Zhi Zhou, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Xianyuan Zhan