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We study Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandit settings with large action spaces. The benchmark estimators suffer from severe bias and variance tradeoffs. Parametric approaches suffer from bias due to difficulty specifying the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-15 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Laura Forastiere

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-19 Ian Waudby-Smith , Lili Wu , Aaditya Ramdas , Nikos Karampatziakis , Paul Mineiro

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE), or offline evaluation in general, evaluates the performance of hypothetical policies leveraging only offline log data. It is particularly useful in applications where the online interaction involves high stakes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-01 Yuta Saito , Takuma Udagawa , Haruka Kiyohara , Kazuki Mogi , Yusuke Narita , Kei Tateno

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aishwarya Mandyam , Shengpu Tang , Jiayu Yao , Jenna Wiens , Barbara E. Engelhardt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Anqi Liu , Hao Liu , Anima Anandkumar , Yisong Yue

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Yusuke Narita , Kyohei Okumura , Akihiro Shimizu , Kohei Yata

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the performance of hypothetical policies using data generated by a different policy. Because of its huge potential impact in practice, there has been growing research interest in this field.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Yuta Saito , Shunsuke Aihara , Megumi Matsutani , Yusuke Narita

We consider local kernel metric learning for off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic policies in contextual bandits with continuous action spaces. Our work is motivated by practical scenarios where the target policy needs to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Haanvid Lee , Jongmin Lee , Yunseon Choi , Wonseok Jeon , Byung-Jun Lee , Yung-Kyun Noh , Kee-Eung Kim

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-05 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq , Arnaud Doucet , Rob Cornish , Jean-Francois Ton

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Olivier Jeunen

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Yuta Saito , Takuma Udagawa , Kei Tateno

Counterfactual estimators are critical for learning and refining policies using logged data, a process known as Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE). OPE allows researchers to assess new policies without costly experiments, speeding up the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Ritam Guha , Nilavra Pathak

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-10 Han Wang , Yang Xu , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Harvineet Singh , Shalmali Joshi , Finale Doshi-Velez , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many…

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alex Irpan , Kanishka Rao , Konstantinos Bousmalis , Chris Harris , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

Evaluating the value of a hypothetical target policy with only a logged dataset is important but challenging. On the one hand, it brings opportunities for safe policy improvement under high-stakes scenarios like clinical guidelines. On the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Hao Sun , Alex J. Chan , Nabeel Seedat , Alihan Hüyük , Mihaela van der Schaar

This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Adith Swaminathan , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , John Langford , Damien Jose , Imed Zitouni

Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Yudai Hayashi , Shuhei Goda , Yuta Saito