Related papers: Stateful Offline Contextual Policy Evaluation and …
Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…
In offline model-based reinforcement learning (offline MBRL), we learn a dynamic model from historically collected data, and subsequently utilize the learned model and fixed datasets for policy learning, without further interacting with the…
Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…
Motivated by the recent discovery of a statistical and computational reduction from contextual bandits to offline regression (Simchi-Levi and Xu, 2021), we address the general (stochastic) Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) problem…
Robust Markov decision processes (r-MDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with…
We consider the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback data across multiple heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, we introduce a novel regret analysis that establishes finite-sample…
We study Exo-MDPs, a structured class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the state space is partitioned into exogenous and endogenous components. Exogenous states evolve stochastically, independent of the agent's actions, while…
We study the problem of learning Markov decision processes with finite state and action spaces when the transition probability distributions and loss functions are chosen adversarially and are allowed to change with time. We introduce an…
Off-policy evaluation estimates how a target policy would perform using data collected by a different behavior policy, which is crucial when online testing is costly or risky, such as in recommendation or healthcare. Standard importance…
When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…
We consider the sequential decision-making problem of making proactive request assignment and rejection decisions for a profit-maximizing operator of an autonomous mobility on demand system. We formalize this problem as a Markov decision…
Off-policy learning (OPL) in contextual bandits aims to learn a decision-making policy that maximizes the target rewards by using only historical interaction data collected under previously developed policies. Unfortunately, when rewards…
General-purpose agents require fine-grained controls and rich sensory inputs to perform a wide range of tasks. However, this complexity often leads to intractable decision-making. Traditionally, agents are provided with task-specific action…
We study the statistical complexity of offline decision-making with function approximation, establishing (near) minimax-optimal rates for stochastic contextual bandits and Markov decision processes. The performance limits are captured by…
Policy learning using historical observational data is an important problem that has found widespread applications. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements to send to customers, as well as selecting which medication to…
Automated decision-making algorithms drive applications such as recommendation systems and search engines. These algorithms often rely on off-policy contextual bandits or off-policy learning (OPL). Conventionally, OPL selects actions that…
Recently, sequence learning methods have been applied to the problem of off-policy Reinforcement Learning, including the seminal work on Decision Transformers, which employs transformers for this task. Since transformers are…
Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…
Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…
Off-policy learning in dynamic decision problems is essential for providing strong evidence that a new policy is better than the one in use. But how can we prove superiority without testing the new policy? To answer this question, we…