Related papers: Counterfactual Risk Minimization: Learning from Lo…

Counterfactual Risk Minimization (CRM) is a framework for dealing with the logged bandit feedback problem, where the goal is to improve a logging policy using offline data. In this paper, we explore the case where it is possible to deploy…

In machine learning we often try to optimise a decision rule that would have worked well over a historical dataset; this is the so called empirical risk minimisation principle. In the context of learning from recommender system logs,…

We present a Bayesian view of counterfactual risk minimization (CRM) for offline learning from logged bandit feedback. Using PAC-Bayesian analysis, we derive a new generalization bound for the truncated inverse propensity score estimator.…

Counterfactual reasoning from logged data has become increasingly important for many applications such as web advertising or healthcare. In this paper, we address the problem of learning stochastic policies with continuous actions from the…

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…

Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…

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…

Counterfactual learning from human bandit feedback describes a scenario where user feedback on the quality of outputs of a historic system is logged and used to improve a target system. We show how to apply this learning framework to neural…

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is the workhorse of machine learning, whether for classification and regression or for off-policy policy learning, but its model-agnostic guarantees can fail when we use adaptively collected data, such as…

The goal of counterfactual learning for statistical machine translation (SMT) is to optimize a target SMT system from logged data that consist of user feedback to translations that were predicted by another, historic SMT system. A challenge…

Improved search quality enhances users' satisfaction, which directly impacts sales growth of an E-Commerce (E-Com) platform. Traditional Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithms require relevance judgments on products. In E-Com, getting such…

A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to…

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…

We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…

In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…

We study conditional risk minimization (CRM), i.e. the problem of learning a hypothesis of minimal risk for prediction at the next step of sequentially arriving dependent data. Despite it being a fundamental problem, successful learning in…

We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Optimizing an interactive system against a predefined online metric is particularly challenging, when the metric is computed from user feedback such as clicks and payments. The key challenge is the counterfactual nature: in the case of Web…

Methods for offline A/B testing and counterfactual learning are seeing rapid adoption in search and recommender systems, since they allow efficient reuse of existing log data. However, there are fundamental limits to using existing log data…