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In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

Algorithmic decision-making in practice must be fair for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. To achieve this, prior research has contributed various approaches that ensure fairness in machine learning predictions, while comparatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

This paper studies the off-policy evaluation problem, where one aims to estimate the value of a target policy based on a sample of observations collected by another policy. We first consider the multi-armed bandit case, establish a minimax…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-09-15 Lihong Li , Remi Munos , Csaba Szepesvari

We present a novel off-policy loss function for learning a transition model in model-based reinforcement learning. Notably, our loss is derived from the off-policy policy evaluation objective with an emphasis on correcting distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Cameron Voloshin , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

Empirical researchers and decision-makers spanning various domains frequently seek profound insights into the long-term impacts of interventions. While the significance of long-term outcomes is undeniable, an overemphasis on them may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Peng Wu , Ziyu Shen , Feng Xie , Zhongyao Wang , Chunchen Liu , Yan Zeng

This paper deals with optimal policy learning (OPL) with observational data, i.e. data-driven optimal decision-making, in multi-action (or multi-arm) settings, where a finite set of decision options is available. It is organized in three…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-01 Giovanni Cerulli

Learning from human feedback has been central to recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Since the collection of human feedback is costly, a natural question to ask is if the new feedback always needs to collected.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-17 Aniruddha Bhargava , Lalit Jain , Branislav Kveton , Ge Liu , Subhojyoti Mukherjee

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Imad Aouali , Otmane Sakhi

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Wenshuo Guo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-02 Yuhan Li , Eugene Han , Yifan Hu , Wenzhuo Zhou , Zhengling Qi , Yifan Cui , Ruoqing Zhu

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

The dynamic portfolio optimization problem in finance frequently requires learning policies that adhere to various constraints, driven by investor preferences and risk. We motivate this problem of finding an allocation policy within a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Nymisha Bandi , Theja Tulabandhula

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

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

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

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-03 Sofia Ek , Dave Zachariah , Fredrik D. Johansson , Petre Stoica

Learning from Observations (LfO) is a practical reinforcement learning scenario from which many applications can benefit through the reuse of incomplete resources. Compared to conventional imitation learning (IL), LfO is more challenging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang