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Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

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

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

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Yusuke Narita , Kyohei Okumura , Akihiro Shimizu , Kohei Yata

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Yuta Saito , Thorsten Joachims

Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-02 Yang Xu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Lan Wang , Rui Song

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 investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE), a central and fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL), in the challenging setting of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with large observation spaces. Recent works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-19 Masahiro Kato , Masatoshi Uehara , Shota Yasui

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-18 Connor Douglas , Joel Persson , Foster Provost

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of evaluating new policies using historical data obtained from a different policy. In the recent OPE context, most studies have focused on single-player cases, and not on multi-player cases. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Kenshi Abe , Yusuke Kaneko

Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Omer Gottesman , Joseph Futoma , Yao Liu , Sonali Parbhoo , Leo Anthony Celi , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Luofeng Liao , Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yixin Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Yihao Feng , Tongzheng Ren , Ziyang Tang , Qiang Liu

Counterfactual estimators are critical for learning and refining policies using logged data, a process known as Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE). OPE allows researchers to assess new policies without costly experiments, speeding up the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Ritam Guha , Nilavra Pathak

Off-policy evaluation provides an essential tool for evaluating the effects of different policies or treatments using only observed data. When applied to high-stakes scenarios such as medical diagnosis or financial decision-making, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Ziyang Tang , Yihao Feng , Na Zhang , Jian Peng , Qiang Liu

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is crucial for assessing a target policy's impact offline before its deployment. However, achieving accurate OPE in large state spaces remains challenging. This paper studies state abstractions -- originally…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-05 Meiling Hao , Pingfan Su , Liyuan Hu , Zoltan Szabo , Qingyuan Zhao , Chengchun Shi

Off-policy evaluation learns a target policy's value with a historical dataset generated by a different behavior policy. In addition to a point estimate, many applications would benefit significantly from having a confidence interval (CI)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-09 Chengchun Shi , Runzhe Wan , Victor Chernozhukov , Rui Song

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aishwarya Mandyam , Shengpu Tang , Jiayu Yao , Jenna Wiens , Barbara E. Engelhardt

This paper addresses the problem of policy selection in domains with abundant logged data, but with a restricted interaction budget. Solving this problem would enable safe evaluation and deployment of offline reinforcement learning policies…