Related papers: Bayesian Counterfactual Risk Minimization
Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…
We consider a robust reinforcement learning problem, where a learning agent learns from a simulated training environment. To account for the model mis-specification between this training environment and the real environment due to lack of…
We study counterfactual prediction under assignment bias and propose a mathematically grounded, information-theoretic approach that removes treatment-covariate dependence without adversarial training. Starting from a bound that links the…
Minimising upper bounds on the population risk or the generalisation gap has been widely used in structural risk minimisation (SRM) -- this is in particular at the core of PAC-Bayesian learning. Despite its successes and unfailing surge of…
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…
Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…
Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…
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…
Off-policy learning (OPL) aims at finding improved policies from logged bandit data, often by minimizing the inverse propensity scoring (IPS) estimator of the risk. In this work, we investigate a smooth regularization for IPS, for which we…
We consider the problem of estimating the transition dynamics $T^*$ from near-optimal expert trajectories in the context of offline model-based reinforcement learning. We develop a novel constraint-based method, Inverse Transition Learning,…
The counterfactual distribution models the effect of the treatment in the untreated group. While most of the work focuses on the expected values of the treatment effect, one may be interested in the whole counterfactual distribution or…
We propose a restricted win probability estimand for comparing treatments in a randomized trial with a time-to-event outcome. We also propose Bayesian estimators for this summary measure as well as the unrestricted win probability. Bayesian…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a classical online optimization model for the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. The traditional MAB is concerned with finding the arm that minimizes the mean cost. However, minimizing the mean…
Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…
In the Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) setting, a prior distribution over the unknown problem parameters -- the rewards and transitions -- is assumed, and a policy that optimizes the (posterior) expected return is sought. A common…
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…
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful framework for constrained control, but its performance and safety can be severely degraded when the prediction model is learned online and thus remains uncertain. In this work, we develop a…
The Bayesian posterior minimizes the "inferential risk" which itself bounds the "predictive risk". This bound is tight when the likelihood and prior are well-specified. However since misspecification induces a gap, the Bayesian posterior…
Bayesian optimisation has proven to be a powerful tool for expensive global black-box optimisation problems. In this paper, we propose new Bayesian optimisation variants of the popular Knowledge Gradient acquisition functions for problems…
We introduce a novel combination of Bayesian Models (BMs) and Neural Networks (NNs) for making predictions with a minimum expected risk. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, the data efficiency and interpretability of a BM with…