Related papers: Supervised Off-Policy Ranking
Supervised imitation-based approaches are often favored over off-policy reinforcement learning approaches for learning policies offline, since their straightforward optimization objective makes them computationally efficient and stable to…
Off-Policy Prediction (OPP), i.e., predicting the outcomes of a target policy using only data collected under a nominal (behavioural) policy, is a paramount problem in data-driven analysis of safety-critical systems where the deployment of…
Many web systems rank and present a list of items to users, from recommender systems to search and advertising. An important problem in practice is to evaluate new ranking policies offline and optimize them before they are deployed. We…
Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…
We propose a robust regression approach to off-policy evaluation (OPE) for contextual bandits. We frame OPE as a covariate-shift problem and leverage modern robust regression tools. Ours is a general approach that can be used to augment any…
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…
This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…
In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…
A fundamental challenge in model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) lies in the trade-off between generalization and robustness against exploitation errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions. While OOD samples may capture valid…
Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…
This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is essential for assessing ranking and recommendation systems without costly online interventions. Self-Normalised Inverse Propensity Scoring (SNIPS) is a standard tool for variance reduction in OPE, leveraging a…
Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a contextual bandit policy prior to deployment. As such, OPE plays a critical role in ensuring safety in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. However, standard OPE approaches are limited…
We study the problem of estimating the distribution of the return of a policy using an offline dataset that is not generated from the policy, i.e., distributional offline policy evaluation (OPE). We propose an algorithm called Fitted…
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…
We introduce an off-policy evaluation procedure for highlighting episodes where applying a reinforcement learned (RL) policy is likely to have produced a substantially different outcome than the observed policy. In particular, we introduce…
We study minimax methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) using value functions and marginalized importance weights. Despite that they hold promises of overcoming the exponential variance in traditional importance sampling, several key…
Off-policy evaluation is a key component of reinforcement learning which evaluates a target policy with offline data collected from behavior policies. It is a crucial step towards safe reinforcement learning and has been used in…