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Related papers: Triply Robust Off-Policy Evaluation

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Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most vibrant research frontiers in machine learning and has been recently applied to solve a number of challenging problems. In this paper, we primarily focus on off-policy evaluation (OPE), one of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-14 Masatoshi Uehara , Chengchun Shi , Nathan Kallus

Offline reinforcement learning aims to utilize datasets of previously gathered environment-action interaction records to learn a policy without access to the real environment. Recent work has shown that offline reinforcement learning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Vaneet Aggarwal

We explore off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) in contextual combinatorial bandits (CCB), where a policy selects a subset in the action space. For example, it might choose a set of furniture pieces (a bed and a drawer) from available…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-22 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Koichi Tanaka , Ren Kishimoto , Haruka Kiyohara , Masahiro Nomura , Yuta Saito

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

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

This study addresses the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) from dependent samples obtained via the bandit algorithm. The goal of OPE is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained from behavior policies generated by the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Masahiro Kato

We study decision making in environments where the reward is only partially observed, but can be modeled as a function of an action and an observed context. This setting, known as contextual bandits, encompasses a wide variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-05-09 Miroslav Dudik , John Langford , Lihong Li

We propose a new framework for designing estimators for off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits. Our approach is based on the asymptotically optimal doubly robust estimator, but we shrink the importance weights to minimize a bound on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Yi Su , Maria Dimakopoulou , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Miroslav Dudík

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-05 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq , Arnaud Doucet , Rob Cornish , Jean-Francois Ton

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the performance of hypothetical policies using data generated by a different policy. Because of its huge potential impact in practice, there has been growing research interest in this field.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Yuta Saito , Shunsuke Aihara , Megumi Matsutani , Yusuke Narita

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

It has become increasingly common for data to be collected adaptively, for example using contextual bandits. Historical data of this type can be used to evaluate other treatment assignment policies to guide future innovation or experiments.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Ruohan Zhan , Vitor Hadad , David A. Hirshberg , Susan Athey

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

We consider local kernel metric learning for off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic policies in contextual bandits with continuous action spaces. Our work is motivated by practical scenarios where the target policy needs to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Haanvid Lee , Jongmin Lee , Yunseon Choi , Wonseok Jeon , Byung-Jun Lee , Yung-Kyun Noh , Kee-Eung Kim

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a contextual bandit policy prior to deployment. As such, OPE plays a critical role in ensuring safety in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. However, standard OPE approaches are limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Aishwarya Mandyam , Kalyani Limaye , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emily Alsentzer

Policy learning using historical observational data is an important problem that has found widespread applications. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements to send to customers, as well as selecting which medication to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Nian Si , Fan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou , Jose Blanchet

We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Zeyang Jia , Kosuke Imai , Michael Lingzhi Li

The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alex Irpan , Kanishka Rao , Konstantinos Bousmalis , Chris Harris , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

Off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) use offline observational data to make better decisions, which is crucial in applications where online experimentation is limited. However, depending entirely on logged data, OPE/L is sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Kaiwen Wang , Zhengyuan Zhou