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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

Autonomous exploration has many important applications. However, classic information gain-based or frontier-based exploration only relies on the robot current state to determine the immediate exploration goal, which lacks the capability of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Yafei Hu , Junyi Geng , Chen Wang , John Keller , Sebastian Scherer

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic target policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with continuous action spaces. While it is common to use importance sampling for OPE, it suffers from high variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Haanvid Lee , Tri Wahyu Guntara , Jongmin Lee , Yung-Kyun Noh , Kee-Eung Kim

The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Olivier Jeunen , Aleksei Ustimenko

The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained via a behavior policy. However, because the contextual bandit algorithm updates the policy based on past observations, the samples are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Masahiro Kato , Yusuke Kaneko

In reinforcement learning, off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the expected return of an evaluation policy given a fixed dataset that was collected by running one or more different policies. One of the more empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna

We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-20 Sutanoy Dasgupta , Yabo Niu , Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil , Debdeep Pati , Bani Mallick

Reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to transform real-world decision-making systems by enabling autonomous agents to learn from experience. Deploying RL in real-world settings, especially in the context of human-robot interaction,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Saurav Singh , Rodney Sanchez , Alexander Ororbia , Jamison Heard

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. We consider for the first time the semiparametric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Riashat Islam , Komal K. Teru , Deepak Sharma , Joelle Pineau

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is widely applied in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and e-commerce to evaluate the efficacy of novel products or policies from offline datasets. This paper introduces a causal deepset framework that relaxes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-26 Runpeng Dai , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou , Shikai Luo , Zhiwei Qin , Chengchun Shi , Hongtu Zhu

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Harvineet Singh , Shalmali Joshi , Finale Doshi-Velez , Himabindu Lakkaraju

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits with finite action space. Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) weighting is a widely used method for OPE due to its unbiased, but it suffers from significant variance when the action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Kushagra Chandak , Vincent Liu , Haanvid Lee

The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

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 learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy ($\pi$) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Masahiro Kato , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Shota Yasui

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

We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Chenjie Mao