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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

We offer a theoretical characterization of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning using function approximation for marginal importance weights and $q$-functions when these are estimated using recent minimax methods. Under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Masatoshi Uehara , Masaaki Imaizumi , Nan Jiang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun , Tengyang Xie

Off-policy learning (OPL) in contextual bandits aims to learn a decision-making policy that maximizes the target rewards by using only historical interaction data collected under previously developed policies. Unfortunately, when rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Rikiya Takehi , Masahiro Asami , Kosuke Kawakami , Yuta Saito

We consider estimation of a linear functional of the treatment effect using adaptively collected data. This task finds a variety of applications including the off-policy evaluation (\textsf{OPE}) in contextual bandits, and estimation of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-21 Jeonghwan Lee , Cong Ma

Offline reinforcement learning aims to utilize datasets of previously gathered environment-action interaction records to learn a policy without access to the real environment. Recent work has shown that offline reinforcement learning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Samin Yeasar Arnob , Doina Precup

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is important for closing the gap between offline training and evaluation of reinforcement learning (RL), by estimating performance and/or rank of target (evaluation) policies using offline trajectories only. It…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Qitong Gao , Ge Gao , Juncheng Dong , Vahid Tarokh , Min Chi , Miroslav Pajic

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is employed to assess the potential impact of a hypothetical policy using logged contextual bandit feedback, which is crucial in areas such as personalized medicine and recommender systems, where online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Yuqi Bai , Ziyu Zhao , Chenxin Lyu , Minqin Zhu , Kun Kuang

Domain shift, encountered when using a trained model for a new patient population, creates significant challenges for sequential decision making in healthcare since the target domain may be both data-scarce and confounded. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Taylor W. Killian , Marzyeh Ghassemi , Shalmali Joshi

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Decision-makers are faced with the challenge of estimating what is likely to happen when they take an action. For instance, if I choose not to treat this patient, are they likely to die? Practitioners commonly use supervised learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-02 Peter Schulam , Suchi Saria

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Jacek Golebiowski , Philipp Schmidt , Ziawasch Abedjan , Artur Bekasov

Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Chandramouli Kamanchi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Machine learning models have shown exceptional prowess in solving complex issues across various domains. However, these models can sometimes exhibit biased decision-making, resulting in unequal treatment of different groups. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Shuyi Chen , Shixiang Zhu

Motivated by practical needs of experimentation and policy learning in online platforms, we study the problem of safe data collection. Specifically, our goal is to develop a logging policy that efficiently explores different actions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Ruihao Zhu , Branislav Kveton

Holdout validation and hyperparameter tuning from data is a long-standing problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL). A standard framework is to use off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods to evaluate and select the policies, but OPE either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Pai Liu , Lingfeng Zhao , Shivangi Agarwal , Jinghan Liu , Audrey Huang , Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang

Off-policy evaluation is critical in a number of applications where new policies need to be evaluated offline before online deployment. Most existing methods focus on the expected return, define the target parameter through averaging and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-10 Yingying Zhang , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo

We introduce an off-policy evaluation procedure for highlighting episodes where applying a reinforcement learned (RL) policy is likely to have produced a substantially different outcome than the observed policy. In particular, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Michael Oberst , David Sontag

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an agent from pre-collected datasets, avoiding unsafe and inefficient real-time interaction. However, inevitable access to out-ofdistribution actions during the learning process introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Fan Zhang , Baoru Huang , Xin Zhang

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Sarthak Ahuja , Mohammad Kachuee , Fateme Sheikholeslami , Weiqing Liu , Jaeyoung Do