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

This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…

Offline policy learning aims to use historical data to learn an optimal personalized decision rule. In the standard estimate-then-optimize framework, reweighting-based methods (e.g., inverse propensity weighting or doubly robust estimators)…

Off-policy learning in dynamic decision problems is essential for providing strong evidence that a new policy is better than the one in use. But how can we prove superiority without testing the new policy? To answer this question, we…

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new…

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…

Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…

Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation~(OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies…

Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…

We study optimal procedures for estimating a linear functional based on observational data. In many problems of this kind, a widely used assumption is strict overlap, i.e., uniform boundedness of the importance ratio, which measures how…

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

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…

Off-policy learning is a framework for evaluating and optimizing policies without deploying them, from data collected by another policy. Real-world environments are typically non-stationary and the offline learned policies should adapt to…

We explore off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) in contextual combinatorial bandits (CCB), where a policy selects a subset in the action space. For example, it might choose a set of furniture pieces (a bed and a drawer) from available…

In interactive systems, actions are often correlated, presenting an opportunity for more sample-efficient off-policy evaluation (OPE) and learning (OPL) in large action spaces. We introduce a unified Bayesian framework to capture these…

We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…

Evaluating policies using off-policy data is crucial for applying reinforcement learning to real-world problems such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Previous methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) generally suffer from high variance…

We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…

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…