Related papers: Doubly Robust Interval Estimation for Optimal Poli…
Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
We introduce a novel doubly-robust (DR) off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimator for Markov decision processes, DRUnknown, designed for situations where both the logging policy and the value function are unknown. The proposed estimator…
In survival contexts, substantial literature exists on estimating optimal treatment regimes, where treatments are assigned based on personal characteristics to maximize the survival probability. These methods assume that a set of covariates…
Contextual bandit algorithms are increasingly replacing non-adaptive A/B tests in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking because they can both improve outcomes for study participants and increase the chance of identifying good or even…
To encourage diverse exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) without compromising accuracy, we propose Policy Split, a novel paradigm that bifurcates the policy into normal and high-entropy modes with a…
In this paper a spectrum sensing policy employing recency-based exploration is proposed for cognitive radio networks. We formulate the problem of finding a spectrum sensing policy for multi-band dynamic spectrum access as a stochastic…
In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
Empirical researchers and decision-makers spanning various domains frequently seek profound insights into the long-term impacts of interventions. While the significance of long-term outcomes is undeniable, an overemphasis on them may…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…
This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…
We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse…
We consider the finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting, and are motivated by the challenge of learning the policy at any step h in dynamic programming (DP) algorithms. To learn this, it is sufficient to evaluate the…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a classical online optimization model for the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. The traditional MAB is concerned with finding the arm that minimizes the mean cost. However, minimizing the mean…
Many interventions, such as vaccines in clinical trials or coupons in online marketplaces, must be assigned sequentially without full knowledge of their effects. Multi-armed bandit algorithms have proven successful in such settings.…
With advances in generative AI, decision-making agents can now dynamically create new actions during online learning, but action generation typically incurs costs that must be balanced against potential benefits. We study an online learning…
The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…
Existing quadrupedal locomotion learning paradigms usually rely on extensive domain randomization to alleviate the sim2real gap and enhance robustness. It trains policies with a wide range of environment parameters and sensor noises to…
Online reinforcement learning (RL) with complex function approximations such as transformers and deep neural networks plays a significant role in the modern practice of artificial intelligence. Despite its popularity and importance,…
Missing data is frequently encountered in many areas of statistics. Propensity score weighting is a popular method for handling missing data. The propensity score method employs a response propensity model, but correct specification of the…