Related papers: Causal policy ranking
Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…
Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…
Resource allocation plays a critical role in minimizing cycle time and improving the efficiency of business processes. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful technique to optimize resource allocation policies…
Counterfactual Learning to Rank (LTR) methods optimize ranking systems using logged user interactions that contain interaction biases. Existing methods are only unbiased if users are presented with all relevant items in every ranking. There…
Strategic classification studies the problem where self-interested individuals or agents manipulate their response to obtain favorable decision outcomes made by classifiers, typically turning to dishonest actions when they are less costly…
We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…
We develop theory and algorithms for average-reward on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first consider bounding the difference of the long-term average reward for two policies. We show that previous work based on the discounted return…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…
Competitive analysis of online algorithms has commonly been applied to understand the behaviour of real-time systems during overload conditions. While competitive analysis provides insight into the behaviour of certain algorithms, it is…
Planned experiments are the gold standard in reliably comparing the causal effect of switching from a baseline policy to a new policy. One critical shortcoming of classical experimental methods, however, is that they typically do not take…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…
Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…
Causal classification models are adopted across a variety of operational business processes to predict the effect of a treatment on a categorical business outcome of interest depending on the process instance characteristics. This allows…
Modernizing legacy software systems is a critical but challenging task, often hampered by a lack of documentation and understanding of the original system's intricate decision logic. Traditional approaches like behavioral cloning merely…
Reinforcement learning (RL) policies may exhibit unsafe behavior and are hard to explain. We use counterfactual large language model reasoning to enhance RL policy safety post-training. We show that our approach improves and helps to…
Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…
Fairness-aware learning studies the development of algorithms that avoid discriminatory decision outcomes despite biased training data. While most studies have concentrated on immediate bias in static contexts, this paper highlights the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on sparse, outcome-level rewards -- yet determining which actions within a long trajectory caused the outcome remains difficult. This credit assignment (CA)…
Questions in causality, control, and reinforcement learning go beyond the classical machine learning task of prediction under i.i.d. observations. Instead, these fields consider the problem of learning how to actively perturb a system to…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function that generates a given optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process. This paper looks at an algorithmic-independent geometric analysis of the IRL problem…