Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation and Learning from Logged Ban…
Importance sampling (IS) is a popular technique in off-policy evaluation, which re-weights the return of trajectories in the replay buffer to boost sample efficiency. However, training with IS can be unstable and previous attempts to…
Propensity score methods are widely used for estimating treatment effects from observational studies. A popular approach is to estimate propensity scores by maximum likelihood based on logistic regression, and then apply inverse probability…
In most real-world recommender systems, the observed rating data are subject to selection bias, and the data are thus missing-not-at-random. Developing a method to facilitate the learning of a recommender with biased feedback is one of the…
Offline learning is a key part of making reinforcement learning (RL) useable in real systems. Offline RL looks at scenarios where there is data from a system's operation, but no direct access to the system when learning a policy. Recent…
Machine unlearning aims to unlearn data points from a learned model, offering a principled way to process data-deletion requests and mitigate privacy risks without full retraining. Prior work has mainly studied unsupervised / supervised…
Many practical applications, such as recommender systems and learning to rank, involve solving multiple similar tasks. One example is learning of recommendation policies for users with similar movie preferences, where the users may still…
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…
Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…
Bayesian Likelihood-Free Inference methods yield posterior approximations for simulator models with intractable likelihood. Recently, many works trained neural networks to approximate either the intractable likelihood or the posterior…
We establish a formal connection between the decades-old surrogate outcome model in biostatistics and economics and the emerging field of prediction-powered inference (PPI). The connection treats predictions from pre-trained models,…
Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…
Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle…
Hierarchical inference systems route tasks across multiple computational layers, where each node may either finalize a prediction locally or offload the task to a node in the next layer for further processing. Learning optimal routing…
In this paper, we leverage the rapid advances in imitation learning, a topic of intense recent focus in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) literature, to develop new sample complexity results and performance guarantees for data-driven Model…
Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any…
We consider the linear contextual multi-class multi-period packing problem (LMMP) where the goal is to pack items such that the total vector of consumption is below a given budget vector and the total value is as large as possible. We…
We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…
We consider combinatorial online learning with subset choices when only relative feedback information from subsets is available, instead of bandit or semi-bandit feedback which is absolute. Specifically, we study two regret minimisation…
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…