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Related papers: Counterfactual Off-Policy Evaluation with Gumbel-M…

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The principal contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework for off-policy reinforcement learning, based on conditional expectations of importance sampling ratios. This framework yields new perspectives and understanding of existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Hado van Hasselt , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul , Rémi Munos , Will Dabney

We evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in repeated game-theoretic settings to assess whether strategic performance reflects genuine reasoning or reliance on memorized patterns. We consider two canonical games, Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dimitrios Georgousis , Maria Lymperaiou , Angeliki Dimitriou , Giorgos Filandrianos , Giorgos Stamou

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

In this paper, we address the challenge of performing counterfactual inference with observational data via Bayesian nonparametric regression adjustment, with a focus on high-dimensional settings featuring multiple actions and multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Alberto Caron , Gianluca Baio , Ioanna Manolopoulou

We propose a new objective, the counterfactual objective, unifying existing objectives for off-policy policy gradient algorithms in the continuing reinforcement learning (RL) setting. Compared to the commonly used excursion objective, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Shangtong Zhang , Wendelin Boehmer , Shimon Whiteson

Model-based methods have recently shown promising for offline reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to learn good policies from historical data without interacting with the environment. Previous model-based offline RL methods learn fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Zheng-Mao Zhu , Xiong-Hui Chen , Hong-Long Tian , Kun Zhang , Yang Yu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Cameron Voloshin , Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

This research addresses the challenge of conducting interpretable causal inference between a binary treatment and its resulting outcome when not all confounders are known. Confounders are factors that have an influence on both the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Sohaib Kiani , Jared Barton , Jon Sushinsky , Lynda Heimbach , Bo Luo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Omer Gottesman , Joseph Futoma , Yao Liu , Sonali Parbhoo , Leo Anthony Celi , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus , Lihong Li , Ali Mousavi

This article provides an introductory tutorial on structural results in partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Typically, computing the optimal policy of a POMDP is computationally intractable. We use lattice program- ming…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-12-15 Vikram Krishnamurthy

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Haoran Xu , Li Jiang , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan

We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Nan Jiang

Off-policy learning in dynamic decision problems is essential for providing strong evidence that a new policy is better than the one in use. But how can we prove superiority without testing the new policy? To answer this question, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-12 Assaf Hallak , François Schnitzler , Timothy Mann , Shie Mannor

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Josiah P. Hanna , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone

Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Otmane Sakhi , Aleksei Arzhantsev , Imad Aouali , Flavian Vasile

Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Da Xu , Yuting Ye , Chuanwei Ruan , Bo Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) tasks are typically framed as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), assuming that decisions are made at fixed time intervals. However, many applications of great importance, including healthcare, do not satisfy this…