Related papers: Exponential Smoothing for Off-Policy Learning

Off-policy learning (OPL) often involves minimizing a risk estimator based on importance weighting to correct bias from the logging policy used to collect data. However, this method can produce an estimator with a high variance. A common…

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…

Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…

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…

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…

This work investigates the offline formulation of the contextual bandit problem, where the goal is to leverage past interactions collected under a behavior policy to evaluate, select, and learn new, potentially better-performing, policies.…

This paper introduces a new principled approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits. Unlike previous work, our approach does not derive learning principles from intractable or loose bounds. We analyse the problem through the…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy using historical data collected under a different logging policy. OPE methods typically assume overlap between the target and logging policy, enabling…

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation for slate bandits, for the typical case in which the logging policy factorizes over the slots of the slate. We slightly depart from the existing literature by taking Bayes risk as the criterion…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…

We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…

We study the problem of offline learning in automated decision systems under the contextual bandits model. We are given logged historical data consisting of contexts, (randomized) actions, and (nonnegative) rewards. A common goal is to…

When learning from a batch of logged bandit feedback, the discrepancy between the policy to be learned and the off-policy training data imposes statistical and computational challenges. Unlike classical supervised learning and online…

Off-policy learning enables training policies from logged interaction data. Most prior work considers the batch setting, where a policy is learned from data generated by a single behavior policy. In real systems, however, policies are…

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods allow us to compute the expected reward of a policy by using the logged data collected by a different policy. OPE is a viable alternative to running expensive online A/B tests: it can speed up the…

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

We study off-policy learning (OPL) of contextual bandit policies in large discrete action spaces where existing methods -- most of which rely crucially on reward-regression models or importance-weighted policy gradients -- fail due to…

We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…

Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…