Related papers: High-Confidence Off-Policy (or Counterfactual) Var…
The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…
We consider a personalized pricing problem in which we have data consisting of feature information, historical pricing decisions, and binary realized demand. The goal is to perform off-policy evaluation for a new personalized pricing policy…
The ability to perform effective off-policy learning would revolutionize the process of building better interactive systems, such as search engines and recommendation systems for e-commerce, computational advertising and news. Recent…
Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…
Domain shift, encountered when using a trained model for a new patient population, creates significant challenges for sequential decision making in healthcare since the target domain may be both data-scarce and confounded. In this paper, we…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…
A great variety of off-policy learning algorithms exist in the literature, and new breakthroughs in this area continue to be made, improving theoretical understanding and yielding state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. In this…
In many domains, the exploration process of reinforcement learning will be too costly as it requires trying out suboptimal policies, resulting in a need for off-policy evaluation, in which a target policy is evaluated based on data…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
Accurate estimation of counterfactual outcomes in high-dimensional data is crucial for decision-making and understanding causal relationships and intervention outcomes in various domains, including healthcare, economics, and social…
It is well known that the historical logs are used for evaluating and learning policies in interactive systems, e.g. recommendation, search, and online advertising. Since direct online policy learning usually harms user experiences, it is…
Off-Policy Estimation (OPE) methods allow us to learn and evaluate decision-making policies from logged data. This makes them an attractive choice for the offline evaluation of recommender systems, and several recent works have reported…
There has been a growing interest in off-policy evaluation in the literature such as recommender systems and personalized medicine. We have so far seen significant progress in developing estimators aimed at accurately estimating the…
Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…
Policy evaluation algorithms are essential to reinforcement learning due to their ability to predict the performance of a policy. However, there are two long-standing issues lying in this prediction problem that need to be tackled:…
In real-world recommender systems and search engines, optimizing ranking decisions to present a ranked list of relevant items is critical. Off-policy evaluation (OPE) for ranking policies is thus gaining a growing interest because it…
When decision-makers can directly intervene, policy evaluation algorithms give valid causal estimates. In off-policy evaluation (OPE), there may exist unobserved variables that both impact the dynamics and are used by the unknown behavior…
Monotonic policy improvement and off-policy learning are two main desirable properties for reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, by lower bounding the performance difference of two policies, we show that the monotonic policy…