Related papers: Sample-efficient Nonstationary Policy Evaluation f…
We provide a sound and consistent foundation for the use of \emph{nonrandom} exploration data in "contextual bandit" or "partially labeled" settings where only the value of a chosen action is learned. The primary challenge in a variety of…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation from batched contextual bandit data with multidimensional actions, often termed slates. The problem is common to recommender systems and user-interface optimization, and it is particularly…
The capability to widely sample the state and action spaces is a key ingredient toward building effective reinforcement learning algorithms. The variational optimization principles exposed in this paper emphasize the importance of an…
We consider offline policy optimization (OPO) in contextual bandits, where one is given a fixed dataset of logged interactions. While pessimistic regularizers are typically used to mitigate distribution shift, prior implementations thereof…
A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…
Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…
We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…
With the fast development of big data, learning the optimal decision rule by recursively updating it and making online decisions has been easier than before. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual…
Contextual multi-armed bandit problems arise frequently in important industrial applications. Existing solutions model the context either linearly, which enables uncertainty driven (principled) exploration, or non-linearly, by using…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…
Most off-policy evaluation methods for contextual bandits have focused on the expected outcome of a policy, which is estimated via methods that at best provide only asymptotic guarantees. However, in many applications, the expectation may…
Users of recommender systems often behave in a non-stationary fashion, due to their evolving preferences and tastes over time. In this work, we propose a practical approach for fast personalization to non-stationary users. The key idea is…
We consider evaluating and training a new policy for the evaluation data by using the historical data obtained from a different policy. The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to estimate the expected reward of a new policy over the…
We study the novel problem of future off-policy evaluation (F-OPE) and learning (F-OPL) for estimating and optimizing the future value of policies in non-stationary environments, where distributions vary over time. In e-commerce…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…
We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which…
For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…
Traditional online learning models are typically initialized from scratch. By contrast, contemporary real-world applications often have access to historical datasets that can potentially enhanced the online learning processes. We study how…
Clinical trials involving multiple treatments utilize randomization of the treatment assignments to enable the evaluation of treatment efficacies in an unbiased manner. Such evaluation is performed in post hoc studies that usually use…