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Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation in Embedded Spaces

200 papers

Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Woohyeon Moon , Luiz Felipe Vecchietti , Dongsoo Har

In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

Off-policy learning and evaluation leverage logged bandit feedback datasets, which contain context, action, propensity score, and feedback for each data point. These scenarios face significant challenges due to high variance and poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Armin Behnamnia , Gholamali Aminian , Alireza Aghaei , Chengchun Shi , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Hamid R. Rabiee

Estimation of importance sampling weights for off-policy evaluation of contextual bandits often results in imbalance - a mismatch between the desired and the actual distribution of state-action pairs after weighting. In this work we present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Arjun Sondhi , David Arbour , Drew Dimmery

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in ranking settings with large ranking action spaces, which stems from an increase in both the number of unique actions and length of the ranking, is essential for assessing new recommender policies using only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Tatsuki Takahashi , Chihiro Maru , Hiroko Shoji

Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Noveen Sachdeva , Yi Su , Thorsten Joachims

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-07-23 Mert Demirer , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Greg Lewis , Victor Chernozhukov

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the benefit of following a counterfactual sequence of actions, given data collected from executed sequences. However, existing OPE estimators often exhibit high bias and high variance in problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Aaman Rebello , Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens , Sonali Parbhoo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Yi Su , Pavithra Srinath , Akshay Krishnamurthy

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Omer Gottesman , Joseph Futoma , Yao Liu , Sonali Parbhoo , Leo Anthony Celi , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

A central challenge to applying many off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problems is the variance introduced by importance sampling. In off-policy learning, the agent learns about a different policy than the one being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Eric Graves , Sina Ghiassian

Off-policy evaluation estimates how a target policy would perform using data collected by a different behavior policy, which is crucial when online testing is costly or risky, such as in recommendation or healthcare. Standard importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ziwen Xie , Shaowen Xiang , Hongyu He , Dianbo Liu

We consider a personalized pricing problem in which we have data consisting of feature information, historical pricing decisions, and binary realized demand. The goal is to perform off-policy evaluation for a new personalized pricing policy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-27 Adam N. Elmachtoub , Vishal Gupta , Yunfan Zhao

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Imad Aouali , Otmane Sakhi

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately evaluate the performance of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data. Although many estimators have been developed, there is no single estimator that dominates the others, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Takuma Udagawa , Haruka Kiyohara , Yusuke Narita , Yuta Saito , Kei Tateno

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit

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

Recent work on policy learning from observational data has highlighted the importance of efficient policy evaluation and has proposed reductions to weighted (cost-sensitive) classification. But, efficient policy evaluation need not yield…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-13 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus