English
Related papers

Related papers: Distributionally Robust Batch Contextual Bandits

200 papers

Empirical risk minimization often performs poorly when the distribution of the target domain differs from those of source domains. To address such potential distribution shifts, we develop an unsupervised domain adaptation approach that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-25 Zhenyu Wang , Peter Bühlmann , Zijian Guo

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Zhi Chen , Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell

Contextual multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-30 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

The abundance of data has led to the emergence of a variety of optimization techniques that attempt to leverage available side information to provide more anticipative decisions. The wide range of methods and contexts of application have…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-05 Mehran Poursoltani , Erick Delage , Angelos Georghiou

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-03 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

Visuomotor policies trained via behavior cloning are vulnerable to covariate shift, where small deviations from expert trajectories can compound into failure. Common strategies to mitigate this issue involve expanding the training…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Zhanyi Sun , Shuran Song

We consider learning from labeled data collected across multiple environments, where the data distribution may vary across these environments. This problem is commonly approached from a causal perspective, seeking invariant representations…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-30 Yuli Slavutsky , David M. Blei

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Exploration and adaptation to new tasks in a transfer learning setup is a central challenge in reinforcement learning. In this work, we build on the idea of modeling a distribution over policies in a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Disha Shrivastava , Eeshan Gunesh Dhekane , Riashat Islam

Off-policy learning is a framework for evaluating and optimizing policies without deploying them, from data collected by another policy. Real-world environments are typically non-stationary and the offline learned policies should adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed

This paper focuses on the problem of detecting and reacting to changes in the distribution of a sensorimotor controller's observables. The key idea is the design of switching policies that can take conformal quantiles as input, which we…

We consider the finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting, and are motivated by the challenge of learning the policy at any step h in dynamic programming (DP) algorithms. To learn this, it is sufficient to evaluate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Tanmay Gangwani , Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Shrey Modi , Anshuka Rangi

We propose a robust regression approach to off-policy evaluation (OPE) for contextual bandits. We frame OPE as a covariate-shift problem and leverage modern robust regression tools. Ours is a general approach that can be used to augment any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Anqi Liu , Hao Liu , Anima Anandkumar , Yisong Yue

This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Adith Swaminathan , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , John Langford , Damien Jose , Imed Zitouni

This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-23 Yilong Wan , Yuqiang Li , Xianyi Wu

When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Hoang M. Le , Cameron Voloshin , Yisong Yue

We consider a fundamental generalization of the classical newsvendor problem where the seller needs to decide on the inventory of a product jointly for multiple locations on a metric as well as a fulfillment policy to satisfy the uncertain…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-04 Ayoub Foussoul , Vineet Goyal

A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Emma Brunskill , Ishani Karmarkar , Zhaoqi Li

The high sample complexity of reinforcement learning challenges its use in practice. A promising approach is to quickly adapt pre-trained policies to new environments. Existing methods for this policy adaptation problem typically rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yuda Song , Aditi Mavalankar , Wen Sun , Sicun Gao

In this paper, we consider the contextual robust optimization problem under an out-of-distribution setting. The contextual robust optimization problem considers a risk-sensitive objective function for an optimization problem with the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-06 Zhongze Cai , Hansheng Jiang , Xiaocheng Li