Related papers: Confounding-Robust Policy Evaluation in Infinite-H…
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…
In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…
We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…
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…
In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance…
Learning to make decisions from observed data in dynamic environments remains a problem of fundamental importance in a number of fields, from artificial intelligence and robotics, to medicine and finance. This paper concerns the problem of…
Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…
We consider the off-policy estimation problem of estimating the expected reward of a target policy using samples collected by a different behavior policy. Importance sampling (IS) has been a key technique to derive (nearly) unbiased…
We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds…
Evaluating novel contextual bandit policies using logged data is crucial in applications where exploration is costly, such as medicine. But it usually relies on the assumption of no unobserved confounders, which is bound to fail in…
Reliable uncertainty quantification is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-stakes settings. We propose a unified conformal prediction framework for infinite-horizon policy evaluation that constructs distribution-free prediction…
Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…
This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…
Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…
Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
In the era of fast-paced precision medicine, observational studies play a major role in properly evaluating new treatments in clinical practice. Yet, unobserved confounding can significantly compromise causal conclusions drawn from…
In applications of offline reinforcement learning to observational data, such as in healthcare or education, a general concern is that observed actions might be affected by unobserved factors, inducing confounding and biasing estimates…
We consider the off-policy evaluation problem of reinforcement learning using deep convolutional neural networks. We analyze the deep fitted Q-evaluation method for estimating the expected cumulative reward of a target policy, when the data…
We consider off-policy policy evaluation when the trajectory data are generated by multiple behavior policies. Recent work has shown the key role played by the state or state-action stationary distribution corrections in the infinite…
We study quantile-optimal policy learning where the goal is to find a policy whose reward distribution has the largest $\alpha$-quantile for some $\alpha \in (0, 1)$. We focus on the offline setting whose generating process involves…