Residuals-based Offline Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhu, Qing, Yu, Xian
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Zhu, Qing
Yu, Xian
author_facet Zhu, Qing
Yu, Xian
contents Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has received increasing attention for learning policies from previously collected data without interaction with the real environment, which is particularly important in high-stakes applications. While a growing body of work has developed offline RL algorithms, these methods often rely on restrictive assumptions about data coverage and suffer from distribution shift. In this paper, we propose a residuals-based offline RL framework for general state and action spaces. Specifically, we define a residuals-based Bellman optimality operator that explicitly incorporates estimation error in learning transition dynamics into policy optimization by leveraging empirical residuals. We show that this Bellman operator is a contraction mapping and identify conditions under which its fixed point is asymptotically optimal and possesses finite-sample guarantees. We further develop a residuals-based offline deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm. Using a stochastic CartPole environment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our residuals-based offline DQN algorithm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01378
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Residuals-based Offline Reinforcement Learning
Zhu, Qing
Yu, Xian
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has received increasing attention for learning policies from previously collected data without interaction with the real environment, which is particularly important in high-stakes applications. While a growing body of work has developed offline RL algorithms, these methods often rely on restrictive assumptions about data coverage and suffer from distribution shift. In this paper, we propose a residuals-based offline RL framework for general state and action spaces. Specifically, we define a residuals-based Bellman optimality operator that explicitly incorporates estimation error in learning transition dynamics into policy optimization by leveraging empirical residuals. We show that this Bellman operator is a contraction mapping and identify conditions under which its fixed point is asymptotically optimal and possesses finite-sample guarantees. We further develop a residuals-based offline deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm. Using a stochastic CartPole environment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our residuals-based offline DQN algorithm.
title Residuals-based Offline Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01378