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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

Recommendation strategies are typically evaluated by using previously logged data, employing off-policy evaluation methods to estimate their expected performance. However, for strategies that present users with slates of multiple items, the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Shreyas Chaudhari , David Arbour , Georgios Theocharous , Nikos Vlassis

We consider a model-based approach to perform batch off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Our method takes a mixture-of-experts approach to combine parametric and non-parametric models of the environment such that the final value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Scott Sussex , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Bernhard Schölkopf , Sergey Levine

Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Yao Liu , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskill

Offline evaluations of recommender systems attempt to estimate users' satisfaction with recommendations using static data from prior user interactions. These evaluations provide researchers and developers with first approximations of the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Mucun Tian , Michael D. Ekstrand

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

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

Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Noveen Sachdeva , Lequn Wang , Dawen Liang , Nathan Kallus , Julian McAuley

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

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions is a well-studied problem. State-of-the-art methods for optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions are divided into online approaches - that learn by directly interacting with…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

The evaluation of recommendation systems is a complex task. The offline and online evaluation metrics for recommender systems are ambiguous in their true objectives. The majority of recently published papers benchmark their methods using…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Petr Kasalický , Rodrigo Alves , Pavel Kordík

There has been a growing interest in off-policy evaluation in the literature such as recommender systems and personalized medicine. We have so far seen significant progress in developing estimators aimed at accurately estimating the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Yuta Saito , Masahiro Nomura

We study estimator selection and hyper-parameter tuning in off-policy evaluation. Although cross-validation is the most popular method for model selection in supervised learning, off-policy evaluation relies mostly on theory, which provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

Importance sampling (IS) is often used to perform off-policy policy evaluation but is prone to several issues, especially when the behavior policy is unknown and must be estimated from data. Significant differences between the target and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Anton Matsson , Fredrik D. Johansson

Accurately evaluating new policies (e.g. ad-placement models, ranking functions, recommendation functions) is one of the key prerequisites for improving interactive systems. While the conventional approach to evaluation relies on online A/B…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Aman Agarwal , Soumya Basu , Tobias Schnabel , Thorsten Joachims

This paper studies the off-policy evaluation problem, where one aims to estimate the value of a target policy based on a sample of observations collected by another policy. We first consider the multi-armed bandit case, establish a minimax…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-09-15 Lihong Li , Remi Munos , Csaba Szepesvari

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

Strict anonymity of model responses is a key for the reliability of voting-based leaderboards, such as LM Arena. While prior studies have attempted to compromise this assumption using simple statistical features like TF-IDF or bag-ofwords,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Minsung Cho , Jaehyung Kim