Related papers: Doubly Robust Interval Estimation for Optimal Poli…
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…
Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…
We study the problem of high-dimensional robust mean estimation in an online setting. Specifically, we consider a scenario where $n$ sensors are measuring some common, ongoing phenomenon. At each time step $t=1,2,\ldots,T$, the $i^{th}$…
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…
This paper deals with optimal policy learning (OPL) with observational data, i.e. data-driven optimal decision-making, in multi-action (or multi-arm) settings, where a finite set of decision options is available. It is organized in three…
We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition…
We introduce a distributionally robust approach that enhances the reliability of offline policy evaluation in contextual bandits under general covariate shifts. Our method aims to deliver robust policy evaluation results in the presence of…
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…
The doubly robust (DR) estimator, which consists of two nuisance parameters, the conditional mean outcome and the logging policy (the probability of choosing an action), is crucial in causal inference. This paper proposes a DR estimator for…
We study the problem of online dynamic pricing with two types of fairness constraints: a "procedural fairness" which requires the proposed prices to be equal in expectation among different groups, and a "substantive fairness" which requires…
We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are vulnerable to adversarial disturbances, which can deteriorate task performance or compromise safety specifications. Existing methods either address safety requirements under the assumption of no…
We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of distributional mismatch between training and deployment, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment…
This paper presents a systematic study on gap-dependent sample complexity in offline reinforcement learning. Prior work showed when the density ratio between an optimal policy and the behavior policy is upper bounded (the optimal policy…
We study robust mean estimation in an online and distributed scenario in the presence of adversarial data attacks. At each time step, each agent in a network receives a potentially corrupted data point, where the data points were originally…
Infinite horizon off-policy policy evaluation is a highly challenging task due to the excessively large variance of typical importance sampling (IS) estimators. Recently, Liu et al. (2018a) proposed an approach that significantly reduces…
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…
Online imitation learning (IL) is an algorithmic framework that leverages interactions with expert policies for efficient policy optimization. Here policies are optimized by performing online learning on a sequence of loss functions that…