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Sampling from a distribution $p(x) \propto e^{-\mathcal{E}(x)}$ known up to a normalising constant is an important and challenging problem in statistics. Recent years have seen the rise of a new family of amortised sampling algorithms,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Arran Carter , Sanghyeok Choi , Kirill Tamogashev , Víctor Elvira , Esmeralda S. Whitammer

It has become increasingly common for data to be collected adaptively, for example using contextual bandits. Historical data of this type can be used to evaluate other treatment assignment policies to guide future innovation or experiments.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Ruohan Zhan , Vitor Hadad , David A. Hirshberg , Susan Athey

The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

Off-policy learning and evaluation leverage logged bandit feedback datasets, which contain context, action, propensity score, and feedback for each data point. These scenarios face significant challenges due to high variance and poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Armin Behnamnia , Gholamali Aminian , Alireza Aghaei , Chengchun Shi , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Hamid R. Rabiee

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

Ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to describe dynamical systems in science, but identifying parameters that explain experimental measurements is challenging. In particular, although ODEs are differentiable and would…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Jonas Beck , Nathanael Bosch , Michael Deistler , Kyra L. Kadhim , Jakob H. Macke , Philipp Hennig , Philipp Berens

In interactive systems, actions are often correlated, presenting an opportunity for more sample-efficient off-policy evaluation (OPE) and learning (OPL) in large action spaces. We introduce a unified Bayesian framework to capture these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Imad Aouali , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , David Rohde , Anna Korba

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), which refers to decision-making from a previously-collected dataset of interactions, has received significant attention over the past years. Much effort has focused on improving offline RL practicality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Paria Rashidinejad , Hanlin Zhu , Kunhe Yang , Stuart Russell , Jiantao Jiao

This study addresses the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) from dependent samples obtained via the bandit algorithm. The goal of OPE is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained from behavior policies generated by the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Masahiro Kato

We apply diffusion strategies to develop a fully-distributed cooperative reinforcement learning algorithm in which agents in a network communicate only with their immediate neighbors to improve predictions about their environment. The…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2014-11-06 Sergio Valcarcel Macua , Jianshu Chen , Santiago Zazo , Ali H. Sayed

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the problem of slate contextual bandits where a policy selects multi-dimensional actions known as slates. This problem is widespread in recommender systems, search engines, marketing, to medical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Haruka Kiyohara , Masahiro Nomura , Yuta Saito

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Test-time compute scaling, the practice of spending extra computation during inference via repeated sampling, search, or extended reasoning, has become a powerful lever for improving large language model performance. Yet deploying these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zhiyuan Zhai , Bingcong Li , Bingnan Xiao , Ming Li , Xin Wang

Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Dongdong Li , Jiuxiang Dong

High-dimensional regression often suffers from heavy-tailed noise and outliers, which can severely undermine the reliability of least-squares based methods. To improve robustness, we adopt a non-smooth Wilcoxon score based rank objective…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-29 Meixia Lin , Meijiao Shi , Yunhai Xiao , Qian Zhang

Off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) use offline observational data to make better decisions, which is crucial in applications where online experimentation is limited. However, depending entirely on logged data, OPE/L is sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Kaiwen Wang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a widely used technique for data classification. The method offers adequate performance in many classification problems, but it becomes inefficient when the data covariance matrix is ill-conditioned.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-08 Maaz Mahadi , Tarig Ballal , Muhammad Moinuddin , Tareq Y. Al-Naffouri , Ubaid M. Al-Saggaf

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation from batched contextual bandit data with multidimensional actions, often termed slates. The problem is common to recommender systems and user-interface optimization, and it is particularly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Nikos Vlassis , Ashok Chandrashekar , Fernando Amat Gil , Nathan Kallus

This work aims to study off-policy evaluation (OPE) under scenarios where two key reinforcement learning (RL) assumptions -- temporal stationarity and individual homogeneity are both violated. To handle the ``double inhomogeneities", we…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-20 Zeyu Bian , Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Lan Wang

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara