Related papers: Stateful Offline Contextual Policy Evaluation and …
For industrial learning-to-rank (LTR) systems, it is common that the output of a ranking model is modified, either as a results of post-processing logic that enforces business requirements, or as a result of unforeseen design flaws or bugs…
The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
Offline reinforcement learning learns an effective policy on offline datasets without online interaction, and it attracts persistent research attention due to its potential of practical application. However, extrapolation error generated by…
We develop confidence bounds that hold uniformly over time for off-policy evaluation in the contextual bandit setting. These confidence sequences are based on recent ideas from martingale analysis and are non-asymptotic, non-parametric, and…
This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…
In Offline Model Learning for Planning and in Offline Reinforcement Learning, the limited data set hinders the estimate of the Value function of the relative Markov Decision Process (MDP). Consequently, the performance of the obtained…
Maximizing long-term rewards is the primary goal in sequential decision-making problems. The majority of existing methods assume that side information is freely available, enabling the learning agent to observe all features' states before…
Learning from human feedback has been central to recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Since the collection of human feedback is costly, a natural question to ask is if the new feedback always needs to collected.…
Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare…
Offline estimation of the dynamical model of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a non-trivial task that greatly depends on the data available in the learning phase. Sometimes the dynamics of the model is invariant with respect to some…
In this paper, we consider the problem of safety assessment for Markov decision processes without explicit knowledge of the model. We aim to learn probabilistic safety specifications associated with a given policy without compromising the…
Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…
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…
This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…
We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…
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…
We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…
Offline contextual bandits allow one to learn policies from historical/offline data without requiring online interaction. However, offline policy optimization that maximizes overall expected rewards can unintentionally amplify the reward…