Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation via the Regularized Lagrangi…
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…
Continuous and efficient experimentation is key to the practical success of user-facing applications on the web, both through online A/B-tests and off-policy evaluation. Despite their shared objective -- estimating the incremental value of…
We provide a statistical analysis of regularization-based continual learning on a sequence of linear regression tasks, with emphasis on how different regularization terms affect the model performance. We first derive the convergence rate…
We consider the offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the agent aims to compute a policy that maximizes expected return while satisfying given cost constraints, learning only from a pre-collected dataset. This…
Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…
Recent work has shown how information theory extends conventional full-rationality game theory to allow bounded rational agents. The associated mathematical framework can be used to solve constrained optimization problems. This is done by…
Regularized regression has become very popular nowadays, particularly on high-dimensional problems where the addition of a penalty term to the log-likelihood allows inference where traditional methods fail. A number of penalties have been…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
Ordinal data are quite common in applied statistics. Although some model selection and regularization techniques for categorical predictors and ordinal response models have been developed over the past few years, less work has been done…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…
On-policy deep reinforcement learning remains a dominant paradigm for continuous control, yet standard implementations rely on Gaussian actors and relatively shallow MLP policies, often leading to brittle optimization when gradients are…
Diffusion planners are a strong approach for offline reinforcement learning, but they can fail when value-guided selection favours trajectories that score well yet are locally inconsistent with the environment dynamics, resulting in brittle…
Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…
The presence of uncertainty in policy evaluation significantly complicates the process of policy ranking and selection in real-world settings. We formally consider offline policy selection as learning preferences over a set of policy…
Functional data analysis is a fast evolving branch of statistics. Estimation procedures for the popular functional linear model either suffer from lack of robustness or are computationally burdensome. To address these shortcomings, a…
While on-policy algorithms are known for their stability, they often demand a substantial number of samples. In contrast, off-policy algorithms, which leverage past experiences, are considered sample-efficient but tend to exhibit…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
This paper explores the role of regularization in data-driven predictive control (DDPC) through the lens of convex relaxation. Using a bi-level optimization framework, we model system identification as an inner problem and predictive…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the benefit of following a counterfactual sequence of actions, given data collected from executed sequences. However, existing OPE estimators often exhibit high bias and high variance in problems…
Lagrangian methods are widely used algorithms for constrained optimization problems, but their learning dynamics exhibit oscillations and overshoot which, when applied to safe reinforcement learning, leads to constraint-violating behavior…