Related papers: Doubly Robust Off-Policy Evaluation for Ranking Po…

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most vibrant research frontiers in machine learning and has been recently applied to solve a number of challenging problems. In this paper, we primarily focus on off-policy evaluation (OPE), one of…

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…

We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE), a central and fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL), in the challenging setting of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with large observation spaces. Recent works…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is one of the most fundamental problems in reinforcement learning (RL) to estimate the expected long-term payoff of a given target policy with only experiences from another behavior policy that is potentially…

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) serves as one of the cornerstones in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE) with various function approximators, especially deep neural networks, has gained practical success. While statistical…

In many real-world reinforcement learning applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed dataset, instead of direct (online) interaction with the environment. When using this data for either evaluation or training of a new…

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…

Assortment optimization is a fundamental challenge in modern retail and recommendation systems, where the goal is to select a subset of products that maximizes expected revenue under complex customer choice behaviors. While recent advances…

Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the outcome of a new policy using historical data collected from a different policy. However, existing OPE methods cannot handle cases when the new policy introduces novel actions. This issue…

The problem of on-line off-policy evaluation (OPE) has been actively studied in the last decade due to its importance both as a stand-alone problem and as a module in a policy improvement scheme. However, most Temporal Difference (TD) based…

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…

Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…

We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV)…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. We consider for the first time the semiparametric…

Offline Reinforcement Learning has attracted much interest in solving the application challenge for traditional reinforcement learning. Offline reinforcement learning uses previously-collected datasets to train agents without any…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods allow us to compute the expected reward of a policy by using the logged data collected by a different policy. OPE is a viable alternative to running expensive online A/B tests: it can speed up the…

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…