Related papers: Off-policy evaluation for MDPs with unknown struct…
Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, particularly in the experience replay setting now commonly used with deep neural networks. Classically, off-policy estimation bias is…
This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…
The dynamic portfolio optimization problem in finance frequently requires learning policies that adhere to various constraints, driven by investor preferences and risk. We motivate this problem of finding an allocation policy within a…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…
We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in partially observable environments with complex observations, with the goal of developing estimators whose guarantee avoids exponential dependence on the horizon. While such estimators exist for MDPs…
In imitation learning, an agent learns how to behave in an environment with an unknown cost function by mimicking expert demonstrations. Existing imitation learning algorithms typically involve solving a sequence of planning or…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
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…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…
It is well known that the historical logs are used for evaluating and learning policies in interactive systems, e.g. recommendation, search, and online advertising. Since direct online policy learning usually harms user experiences, it is…
The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…
Most of the policy evaluation algorithms are based on the theories of Bellman Expectation and Optimality Equation, which derive two popular approaches - Policy Iteration (PI) and Value Iteration (VI). However, multi-step bootstrapping is…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…
While the classic off-policy evaluation (OPE) literature commonly assumes decision time points to be evenly spaced for simplicity, in many real-world scenarios, such as those involving user-initiated visits, decisions are made at…
The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…
Many sequential decision-making systems leverage data collected using prior policies to propose a new policy. For critical applications, it is important that high-confidence guarantees on the new policy's behavior are provided before…
We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…
We introduce an off-policy evaluation procedure for highlighting episodes where applying a reinforcement learned (RL) policy is likely to have produced a substantially different outcome than the observed policy. In particular, we introduce…