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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

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

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of a policy from the data generated by another policy(ies). In particular, we focus on the doubly robust (DR)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Mehrdad Farajtabar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

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

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods aim to estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aishwarya Mandyam , Jason Meng , Ge Gao , Jiankai Sun , Mac Schwager , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emma Brunskill

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Developing theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity of offline RL methods is an important step towards making data-hungry RL algorithms practically viable. Currently, most results hinge on unrealistic assumptions about the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Sunil Madhow , Dan Qiao , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

We study the problem of off-policy policy evaluation (OPPE) in RL. In contrast to prior work, we consider how to estimate both the individual policy value and average policy value accurately. We draw inspiration from recent work in causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Aniruddh Raghu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

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

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Allen Nie , Yash Chandak , Christina J. Yuan , Anirudhan Badrinath , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskil

State abstraction has been an essential tool for dramatically improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement-learning algorithms. Indeed, by exposing and accentuating various types of latent structure within the environment, different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables but the behavior policy depends on latent states (Tennenholtz et al. (2020a)). Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Yash Nair , Nan Jiang

The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

In this work, we propose marginalized operators, a new class of off-policy evaluation operators for reinforcement learning. Marginalized operators strictly generalize generic multi-step operators, such as Retrace, as special cases.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Yunhao Tang , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most vibrant research frontiers in machine learning and has been recently applied to solve a number of challenging problems. In this paper, we primarily focus on off-policy evaluation (OPE), one of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-14 Masatoshi Uehara , Chengchun Shi , Nathan Kallus

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq

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

Many sequential decision making problems are high-stakes and require off-policy evaluation (OPE) of a new policy using historical data collected using some other policy. One of the most common OPE techniques that provides unbiased estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Christina J. Yuan , Yash Chandak , Stephen Giguere , Philip S. Thomas , Scott Niekum

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