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Related papers: Universal Off-Policy Evaluation

200 papers

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

We study the problem of choosing optimal policy rules in uncertain environments using models that may be incomplete and/or partially identified. We consider a policymaker who wishes to choose a policy to maximize a particular counterfactual…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-12-22 Thomas M. Russell

Ranking interfaces are everywhere in online platforms. There is thus an ever growing interest in their Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), aiming towards an accurate performance evaluation of ranking policies using logged data. A de-facto approach…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-28 Haruka Kiyohara , Masatoshi Uehara , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto , Yuta Saito

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-21 Victor Chernozhukov , Sokbae Lee , Adam M. Rosen , Liyang Sun

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

Off-policy learning is a framework for evaluating and optimizing policies without deploying them, from data collected by another policy. Real-world environments are typically non-stationary and the offline learned policies should adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed

We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We benchmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational…

Decision-makers often act in response to data-driven predictions, with the goal of achieving favorable outcomes. In such settings, predictions don't passively forecast the future; instead, predictions actively shape the distribution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Michael P. Kim , Juan C. Perdomo

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-27 Adam N. Elmachtoub , Vishal Gupta , Yunfan Zhao

Personalized treatment decisions have become an integral part of modern medicine. Thereby, the aim is to make treatment decisions based on individual patient characteristics. Numerous methods have been developed for learning such policies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-27 Daniel Tschernutter , Tobias Hatt , Stefan Feuerriegel

Before A/B testing online a new version of a recommender system, it is usual to perform some offline evaluations on historical data. We focus on evaluation methods that compute an estimator of the potential uplift in revenue that could…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Alexandre Gilotte , Clément Calauzènes , Thomas Nedelec , Alexandre Abraham , Simon Dollé

Decisions are often based on imprecise, uncertain or vague information. Likewise, the consequences of an action are often equally unpredictable, thus putting the decision maker into a twofold jeopardy. Assuming that the effects of an action…

General Economics · Economics 2022-05-03 Stefan Rass , Sandra König , Stefan Schauer

Reliable uncertainty quantification is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-stakes settings. We propose a unified conformal prediction framework for infinite-horizon policy evaluation that constructs distribution-free prediction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-31 Feichen Gan , Youcun Lu , Yingying Zhang , Yukun Liu

The dynamic portfolio optimization problem in finance frequently requires learning policies that adhere to various constraints, driven by investor preferences and risk. We motivate this problem of finding an allocation policy within a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Nymisha Bandi , Theja Tulabandhula

Algorithmic decision-making in practice must be fair for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. To achieve this, prior research has contributed various approaches that ensure fairness in machine learning predictions, while comparatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

Personalized preference alignment for LLMs with diverse human preferences requires evaluation and alignment methods that capture pluralism. Most existing preference alignment datasets are logged under policies that differ substantially from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Chengkai Huang , Junda Wu , Zhouhang Xie , Yu Xia , Rui Wang , Tong Yu , Subrata Mitra , Julian McAuley , Lina Yao

In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-12 Yuta Saito , Qingyang Ren , Thorsten Joachims

Human decision making is well known to be imperfect and the ability to analyse such processes individually is crucial when attempting to aid or improve a decision-maker's ability to perform a task, e.g. to alert them to potential biases or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Alex J. Chan , Alicia Curth , Mihaela van der Schaar

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Nathan Kallus