Related papers: Confounding-Robust Policy Evaluation in Infinite-H…
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…
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…
Causal effect estimation has been studied by many researchers when only observational data is available. Sound and complete algorithms have been developed for pointwise estimation of identifiable causal queries. For non-identifiable causal…
Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…
In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to…
Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or…
We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…
This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Inspired by the two-way fixed effects regression model widely used in the panel data literature, we propose a two-way unmeasured confounding…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalized decision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Only the outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical…
In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
With the recent advancements of technology in facilitating real-time monitoring and data collection, "just-in-time" interventions can be delivered via mobile devices to achieve both real-time and long-term management and control.…
We address the problem of learning a decision policy from observational data of past decisions in contexts with features and associated outcomes. The past policy maybe unknown and in safety-critical applications, such as medical decision…
On a variety of complex decision-making tasks, from doctors prescribing treatment to judges setting bail, machine learning algorithms have been shown to outperform expert human judgments. One complication, however, is that it is often…
We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…
Deep neural policies have recently been installed in a diverse range of settings, from biotechnology to automated financial systems. However, the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the value function leads to concerns on the…
Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…
To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…
In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…