Related papers: Confounding-Robust Policy Evaluation in Infinite-H…
Sensitivity analysis for unmeasured confounding under incremental propensity score interventions remains relatively underdeveloped. Incremental interventions define stochastic treatment regimes by multiplying the odds of treatment, offering…
This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist…
We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…
Many definitions of fairness or inequity involve unobservable causal quantities that cannot be directly estimated without strong assumptions. For instance, it is particularly difficult to estimate notions of fairness that rely on…
Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…
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…
In this paper, we investigate the sample complexity of policy evaluation in infinite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (also known as the off-policy evaluation problem) with linear function approximation. We identify a hard regime…
The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…
Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…
We propose a general formulation for addressing reinforcement learning (RL) problems in settings with observational data. That is, we consider the problem of learning good policies solely from historical data in which unobserved factors…
We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…
Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the task of estimating the expected reward of a given policy based on offline data previously collected under different policies. Therefore, OPE is a key step in applying reinforcement learning to real-world…
In this work, we address the challenging problem of long-horizon goal-reaching policy learning from non-expert, action-free observation data. Unlike fully labeled expert data, our data is more accessible and avoids the costly process of…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
This paper provides a unified framework for bounding policy relevant treatment effects using instrumental variables. In this framework, the treatment selection may depend on multidimensional unobserved heterogeneity. We derive bilinear…
Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…