Related papers: State Relevance for Off-Policy Evaluation
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…
We present a new method for estimating the expected return of a POMDP from experience. The method does not assume any knowledge of the POMDP and allows the experience to be gathered from an arbitrary sequence of policies. The return is…
Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…
We propose a technique called Optimal Analysis-Specific Importance Sampling (OASIS) to reduce the number of simulated events required for a high-energy experimental analysis to reach a target sensitivity. We provide recipes to obtain the…
The principal contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework for off-policy reinforcement learning, based on conditional expectations of importance sampling ratios. This framework yields new perspectives and understanding of existing…
We study Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandit settings with large action spaces. The benchmark estimators suffer from severe bias and variance tradeoffs. Parametric approaches suffer from bias due to difficulty specifying the…
Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but counteracting off-policy bias without exacerbating variance is challenging. Classically, off-policy bias is corrected in a per-decision…
The paper introduces AND/OR importance sampling for probabilistic graphical models. In contrast to importance sampling, AND/OR importance sampling caches samples in the AND/OR space and then extracts a new sample mean from the stored…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of a policy from the data generated by another policy(ies). In particular, we focus on the doubly robust (DR)…
Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…
We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique that relies on weighted samples, simulated from a proposal distribution, to estimate intractable integrals. The quality of the estimators improves with the number of samples. However, for…
Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…
Importance sampling has been known as a powerful tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimator for rare event simulation. Based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of Monte Carlo estimator within a parametric family, we…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables and the behavior policy depends on unobservable latent variables. Existing…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…
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…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…