RL-IF: Tracking Non-local Training Data Influence for Online Reinforcement Learning

Shixuan Liu, Cheng Tang, Yuzheng Hu, Fan Wu, Han Zhao +1

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved significant success in decision-making tasks, but modern online RL remains highly sensitive to the quality of training experience. Understanding the contribution of individual training instances is therefore central to data-centric RL, with applications ranging from experience selection to policy interpretation. Existing data attribution methods for online RL primarily focus on local influence within a single training round, overlooking the non-local data influence across multiple training rounds. In this work, we formalize data attribution in online RL through a trajectory-level leave-one-out quantity, RL-LOO, which measures how one training sample influences a downstream target after subsequent online updates have taken place. We then derive RL-IF, a first-order estimator that propagates data influence through both optimization effects and policy-induced sampling effects, and provide theoretical guarantees on its approximation accuracy under smoothness assumptions. Our analysis further disentangles these two effects and shows both theoretically and empirically that the full RL-IF estimator can often be well approximated using the…