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Related papers: Bayesian Counterfactual Risk Minimization

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PAC-Bayes has recently re-emerged as an effective theory with which one can derive principled learning algorithms with tight performance guarantees. However, applications of PAC-Bayes to bandit problems are relatively rare, which is a great…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Hamish Flynn , David Reeb , Melih Kandemir , Jan Peters

A general class of Bayesian lower bounds when the underlying loss function is a Bregman divergence is demonstrated. This class can be considered as an extension of the Weinstein--Weiss family of bounds for the mean squared error and relies…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Alex Dytso , Michael Fauß , H. Vincent Poor

With the widespread accumulation of observational data, researchers obtain a new direction to learn counterfactual effects in many domains (e.g., health care and computational advertising) without Randomized Controlled Trials(RCTs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Guanglin Zhou , Lina Yao , Xiwei Xu , Chen Wang , Liming Zhu

The ability to perform offline A/B-testing and off-policy learning using logged contextual bandit feedback is highly desirable in a broad range of applications, including recommender systems, search engines, ad placement, and personalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Yi Su , Lequn Wang , Michele Santacatterina , Thorsten Joachims

Counterfactual evaluation can estimate Click-Through-Rate (CTR) differences between ranking systems based on historical interaction data, while mitigating the effect of position bias and item-selection bias. We introduce the novel…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Inference scaling helps LLMs solve complex reasoning problems through extended runtime computation. On top of long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) models, purely inference-time techniques such as best-of-N (BoN) sampling, majority voting, or…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, offers the prospect of policy optimization from large pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction. It addresses challenges with regard to the cost of data…

We consider a Bayesian approach to offline model-based inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). The proposed framework differs from existing offline model-based IRL approaches by performing simultaneous estimation of the expert's reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Ran Wei , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Anthony McDonald , Mingyi Hong

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Nikos Vlassis , Ashok Chandrashekar , Fernando Amat Gil , Nathan Kallus

Popular offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on explicit conservatism, penalizing out-of-dataset actions or restricting rollout horizons. We question the universality of this principle and revisit a complementary Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Tianwei Ni , Esther Derman , Vineet Jain , Vincent Taboga , Siamak Ravanbakhsh , Pierre-Luc Bacon

Control policies from imitation learning can often fail to generalize to novel environments due to imperfect demonstrations or the inability of imitation learning algorithms to accurately infer the expert's policies. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Allen Z. Ren , Sushant Veer , Anirudha Majumdar

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of learning a performant policy from a fixed batch of data collected by following some behavior policy. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing in the offline setting since…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Jeong , Xiaoyu Wang , Michael Gimelfarb , Hyunwoo Kim , Baher Abdulhai , Scott Sanner

Generalization bounds which assess the difference between the true risk and the empirical risk, have been studied extensively. However, to obtain bounds, current techniques use strict assumptions such as a uniformly bounded or a Lipschitz…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Itai Gat , Yossi Adi , Alexander Schwing , Tamir Hazan

Bayesian optimization has emerged as a prominent methodology for optimizing expensive black-box functions by leveraging Gaussian process surrogates, which focus on capturing the global characteristics of the objective function. However, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Qiyu Wei , Haowei Wang , Richard Allmendinger , Mauricio A. Álvarez

Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Peng Wu , Haoxuan Li , Chunyuan Zheng , Yan Zeng , Jiawei Chen , Yang Liu , Ruocheng Guo , Kun Zhang

When learning from a batch of logged bandit feedback, the discrepancy between the policy to be learned and the off-policy training data imposes statistical and computational challenges. Unlike classical supervised learning and online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-02 Yuan Xie , Boyi Liu , Qiang Liu , Zhaoran Wang , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Meta-Learning is a family of methods that use a set of interrelated tasks to learn a model that can quickly learn a new query task from a possibly small contextual dataset. In this study, we use a probabilistic framework to formalize what…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-03 Shin-ichi Maeda , Toshiki Nakanishi , Masanori Koyama

Policy inference plays an essential role in the contextual bandit problem. In this paper, we use empirical likelihood to develop a Bayesian inference method for the joint analysis of multiple contextual bandit policies in finite sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-12 Jiangrong Ouyang , Mingming Gong , Howard Bondell

We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern marketing campaigns, in which a central agent tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives to customers and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-12 Romain Lopez , Chenchen Li , Xiang Yan , Junwu Xiong , Michael I. Jordan , Yuan Qi , Le Song

We propose the first general PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for adversarial robustness, that estimate, at test time, how much a model will be invariant to imperceptible perturbations in the input. Instead of deriving a worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Paul Viallard , Guillaume Vidot , Amaury Habrard , Emilie Morvant