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We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a…
This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…
What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward…
We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…
The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
This work investigates the offline formulation of the contextual bandit problem, where the goal is to leverage past interactions collected under a behavior policy to evaluate, select, and learn new, potentially better-performing, policies.…
Contextual bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully used in various interactive learning systems such as online advertising, recommender systems, and dynamic pricing. However, they have yet to be widely adopted in…
Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…
We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse…
High-quality data plays a central role in ensuring the accuracy of policy evaluation. This paper initiates the study of efficient and safe data collection for bandit policy evaluation. We formulate the problem and investigate its several…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
We study off-policy evaluation and learning from sequential data in a structured class of Markov decision processes that arise from repeated interactions with an exogenous sequence of arrivals with contexts, which generate unknown…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…
In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…
Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…