Related papers: Conformal Off-policy Prediction
Learning from human feedback has been central to recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Since the collection of human feedback is costly, a natural question to ask is if the new feedback always needs to collected.…
While the classic off-policy evaluation (OPE) literature commonly assumes decision time points to be evenly spaced for simplicity, in many real-world scenarios, such as those involving user-initiated visits, decisions are made at…
Traditional conformal prediction methods construct prediction sets such that the true label falls within the set with a user-specified coverage level. However, poorly chosen coverage levels can result in uninformative predictions, either…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…
This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…
Regression problems with bounded continuous outcomes frequently arise in real-world statistical and machine learning applications, such as the analysis of rates and proportions. A central challenge in this setting is predicting a response…
A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…
Real-world evaluation of perception-based planning models for robotic systems, such as autonomous vehicles, can be safely and inexpensively conducted offline, i.e. by computing model prediction error over a pre-collected validation dataset…
Conformal prediction is a simple and powerful tool that can quantify uncertainty without any distributional assumptions. Many existing methods only address the average coverage guarantee, which is not ideal compared to the stronger…
We consider evaluating and training a new policy for the evaluation data by using the historical data obtained from a different policy. The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to estimate the expected reward of a new policy over the…
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…
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…
We consider the off-policy estimation problem of estimating the expected reward of a target policy using samples collected by a different behavior policy. Importance sampling (IS) has been a key technique to derive (nearly) unbiased…
Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale…
We consider off-policy evaluation in the contextual bandit setting for the purpose of obtaining a robust off-policy selection strategy, where the selection strategy is evaluated based on the value of the chosen policy in a set of proposal…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) have received rising interest due to its appealing data efficiency. The present study addresses behavior estimation, a task that lays the foundation of many offline RL algorithms. Behavior estimation aims…
For an autonomous agent, executing a poor policy may be costly or even dangerous. For such agents, it is desirable to determine confidence interval lower bounds on the performance of any given policy without executing said policy. Current…
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…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…