Related papers: Confident Off-Policy Evaluation and Selection thro…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice…
In reinforcement learning, it is typical to use the empirically observed transitions and rewards to estimate the value of a policy via either model-based or Q-fitting approaches. Although straightforward, these techniques in general yield…
We introduce a distributionally robust approach that enhances the reliability of offline policy evaluation in contextual bandits under general covariate shifts. Our method aims to deliver robust policy evaluation results in the presence of…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…
Recommendation strategies are typically evaluated by using previously logged data, employing off-policy evaluation methods to estimate their expected performance. However, for strategies that present users with slates of multiple items, the…
For an autonomous agent, executing a poor policy may be costly or even dangerous. For such agents, it is desirable to determine confidence interval lower bounds on the performance of any given policy without executing said policy. Current…
This paper proposes an off-policy risk-sensitive reinforcement learning based control framework for stabilization of a continuous-time nonlinear system that subjects to additive disturbances, input saturation, and state constraints. By…
Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…
We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…
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…
The analysis of online least squares estimation is at the heart of many stochastic sequential decision making problems. We employ tools from the self-normalized processes to provide a simple and self-contained proof of a tail bound of a…
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…
The (contextual) multi-armed bandit problem (MAB) provides a formalization of sequential decision-making which has many applications. However, validly evaluating MAB policies is challenging; we either resort to simulations which inherently…
We study high-confidence behavior-agnostic off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate a confidence interval on a target policy's value, given only access to a static experience dataset collected by…
We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…
Traditional insurance pricing relies on risk-based principles that ensure actuarial fairness and solvency but do not explicitly account for policyholders' price sensitivity. We formulate insurance pricing as a decision-making problem and…
One of the questions that arises when designing models that learn to solve multiple tasks simultaneously is how much of the available training budget should be devoted to each individual task. We refer to any formalized approach to…
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…
Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…