Related papers: Off-policy evaluation beyond overlap: partial iden…

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the problem of slate contextual bandits where a policy selects multi-dimensional actions known as slates. This problem is widespread in recommender systems, search engines, marketing, to medical…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to learn treatment policies and aid decision making in healthcare. However, given the need for generalization over complex state/action spaces, the incorporation of function approximators (e.g., deep…

In off policy evaluation (OPE) for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), an agent must infer hidden states from past observations, which exacerbates both the curse of horizon and the curse of memory in existing OPE…

We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…

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…

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…

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…

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

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…

Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…

Evaluating the value of a hypothetical target policy with only a logged dataset is important but challenging. On the one hand, it brings opportunities for safe policy improvement under high-stakes scenarios like clinical guidelines. On the…

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

This paper investigates the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem from a distributional perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the expectation of the total return, as in most existing OPE methods, we aim to estimate the entire return…

Off-policy policy evaluation methods for sequential decision making can be used to help identify if a proposed decision policy is better than a current baseline policy. However, a new decision policy may be better than a baseline policy for…

The problem of on-line off-policy evaluation (OPE) has been actively studied in the last decade due to its importance both as a stand-alone problem and as a module in a policy improvement scheme. However, most Temporal Difference (TD) based…

We study the novel problem of future off-policy evaluation (F-OPE) and learning (F-OPL) for estimating and optimizing the future value of policies in non-stationary environments, where distributions vary over time. In e-commerce…

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…

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in continuous treatment settings, such as personalized dose-finding. In OPE, one aims to estimate the mean outcome under a new treatment decision rule using historical data generated by a different…

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

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…