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Related papers: Universal Off-Policy Evaluation

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We consider off-policy policy evaluation when the trajectory data are generated by multiple behavior policies. Recent work has shown the key role played by the state or state-action stationary distribution corrections in the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Xinyun Chen , Lu Wang , Yizhe Hang , Heng Ge , Hongyuan Zha

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Olivier Jeunen

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

We consider a model-based approach to perform batch off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Our method takes a mixture-of-experts approach to combine parametric and non-parametric models of the environment such that the final value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Scott Sussex , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-10 Han Wang , Yang Xu , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a target policy with data generated by other policies. Most previous OPE methods focus on precisely estimating the true performance of a policy. We observe that in many applications, (1) the end…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Yue Jin , Yue Zhang , Tao Qin , Xudong Zhang , Jian Yuan , Houqiang Li , Tie-Yan Liu

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately evaluate the performance of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data. Although many estimators have been developed, there is no single estimator that dominates the others, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Takuma Udagawa , Haruka Kiyohara , Yusuke Narita , Yuta Saito , Kei Tateno

Off-policy evaluation learns a target policy's value with a historical dataset generated by a different behavior policy. In addition to a point estimate, many applications would benefit significantly from having a confidence interval (CI)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-09 Chengchun Shi , Runzhe Wan , Victor Chernozhukov , Rui Song

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Yusuke Narita , Kyohei Okumura , Akihiro Shimizu , Kohei Yata

Assessing the effects of a policy based on observational data from a different policy is a common problem across several high-stake decision-making domains, and several off-policy evaluation (OPE) techniques have been proposed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Sonali Parbhoo , Shalmali Joshi , Finale Doshi-Velez

When observed decisions depend only on observed features, off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) methods for sequential decision making problems can estimate the performance of evaluation policies before deploying them. This assumption is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-13 Hongseok Namkoong , Ramtin Keramati , Steve Yadlowsky , Emma Brunskill

Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Yao Liu , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskill

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many…

We consider the off-policy estimation problem of estimating the expected reward of a target policy using samples collected by a different behavior policy. Importance sampling (IS) has been a key technique to derive (nearly) unbiased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Qiang Liu , Lihong Li , Ziyang Tang , Dengyong Zhou

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the task of estimating the expected reward of a given policy based on offline data previously collected under different policies. Therefore, OPE is a key step in applying reinforcement learning to real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Yihao Feng , Ziyang Tang , Na Zhang , Qiang Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Konstantin Hess , Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit