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Importance sampling-based estimators for off-policy evaluation (OPE) are valued for their simplicity, unbiasedness, and reliance on relatively few assumptions. However, the variance of these estimators is often high, especially when…
Off-policy Evaluation (OPE), or offline evaluation in general, evaluates the performance of hypothetical policies leveraging only offline log data. It is particularly useful in applications where the online interaction involves high stakes…
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…
Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…
In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…
Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is crucial for assessing a target policy's impact offline before its deployment. However, achieving accurate OPE in large state spaces remains challenging. This paper studies state abstractions -- originally…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas…
Short- and long-term outcomes of an algorithm often differ, with damaging downstream effects. A known example is a click-bait algorithm, which may increase short-term clicks but damage long-term user engagement. A possible solution to…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice…
Many sequential decision making problems are high-stakes and require off-policy evaluation (OPE) of a new policy using historical data collected using some other policy. One of the most common OPE techniques that provides unbiased estimates…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…
In many domains, the exploration process of reinforcement learning will be too costly as it requires trying out suboptimal policies, resulting in a need for off-policy evaluation, in which a target policy is evaluated based on data…
We offer an experimental benchmark and empirical study for off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning, which is a key problem in many safety critical applications. Given the increasing interest in deploying learning-based…
In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while…
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…
Assessing the effects of a policy based on observational data from a different policy is a common problem across several high-stake decision-making domains, and several off-policy evaluation (OPE) techniques have been proposed. However,…
Importance sampling (IS) is a common reweighting strategy for off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. While it is consistent and unbiased, it can result in high variance updates to the weights for the value function. In this work,…