English
Related papers

Related papers: Conformal Off-Policy Evaluation in Markov Decision…

200 papers

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

This study addresses the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) from dependent samples obtained via the bandit algorithm. The goal of OPE is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained from behavior policies generated by the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Masahiro Kato

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

Personalized preference alignment for LLMs with diverse human preferences requires evaluation and alignment methods that capture pluralism. Most existing preference alignment datasets are logged under policies that differ substantially from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Chengkai Huang , Junda Wu , Zhouhang Xie , Yu Xia , Rui Wang , Tong Yu , Subrata Mitra , Julian McAuley , Lina Yao

We study offline meta-reinforcement learning, a practical reinforcement learning paradigm that learns from offline data to adapt to new tasks. The distribution of offline data is determined jointly by the behavior policy and the task.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Haoqi Yuan , Zongqing Lu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift problem. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated policy constraints between the learned policy and the behavior policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Yang Yue , Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Qisen Yang , Gao Huang , Shiji Song , Shuicheng Yan

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) serves as one of the cornerstones in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE) with various function approximators, especially deep neural networks, has gained practical success. While statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Ruiqi Zhang , Xuezhou Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Mengdi Wang

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

Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Otmane Sakhi , Aleksei Arzhantsev , Imad Aouali , Flavian Vasile

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

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

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-14 Tatsuki Takahashi , Chihiro Maru , Hiroko Shoji

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

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) 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

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

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

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy learns to maximize cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. Towards conservative strategy, current methods choose to regularize the behavior policy or learn a lower bound of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Yuhang Jiang , Shuncheng He , Xiangyang Ji