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We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables and the behavior policy depends on unobservable latent variables. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Chengchun Shi , Masatoshi Uehara , Jiawei Huang , Nan Jiang

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Ranking interfaces are everywhere in online platforms. There is thus an ever growing interest in their Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), aiming towards an accurate performance evaluation of ranking policies using logged data. A de-facto approach…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-28 Haruka Kiyohara , Masatoshi Uehara , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto , Yuta Saito

The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained via a behavior policy. However, because the contextual bandit algorithm updates the policy based on past observations, the samples are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Masahiro Kato , Yusuke Kaneko

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-02 Yuan Xie , Boyi Liu , Qiang Liu , Zhaoran Wang , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Ratings of a user to most items in recommender systems are usually missing not at random (MNAR), largely because users are free to choose which items to rate. To achieve unbiased learning of the prediction model under MNAR data, three…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Haoxuan Li , Chunyuan Zheng , Wenjie Wang , Hao Wang , Fuli Feng , Xiao-Hua Zhou

Infinite horizon off-policy policy evaluation is a highly challenging task due to the excessively large variance of typical importance sampling (IS) estimators. Recently, Liu et al. (2018a) proposed an approach that significantly reduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-17 Ziyang Tang , Yihao Feng , Lihong Li , Dengyong Zhou , Qiang Liu

In an Markov decision process (MDP), unobservable confounders may exist and have impacts on the data generating process, so that the classic off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimators may fail to identify the true value function of the target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Miao Lu , Wenhao Yang , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

Off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) use offline observational data to make better decisions, which is crucial in applications where online experimentation is limited. However, depending entirely on logged data, OPE/L is sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Kaiwen Wang , Zhengyuan Zhou

We propose a new framework for designing estimators for off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits. Our approach is based on the asymptotically optimal doubly robust estimator, but we shrink the importance weights to minimize a bound on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Yi Su , Maria Dimakopoulou , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Miroslav Dudík

We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Yu-Xiang Wang , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudik

Doubly robust (DR) estimators guard against model misspecification but remain sensitive to weak covariate overlap. We show that trimming propensity scores reduces variance but eliminates double robustness. We introduce DR estimators that…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-17 Yukun Ma , Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna , Yuya Sasaki , Takuya Ura

Doubly robust (DR) estimation is a crucial technique in causal inference and missing data problems. We propose a novel Propensity score Augmentved Doubly robust (PAD) estimator to enhance the commonly used DR estimator for average treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-18 Liangbo Lyu , Molei Liu

In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alex Irpan , Kanishka Rao , Konstantinos Bousmalis , Chris Harris , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

The doubly robust (DR) estimator, which consists of two nuisance parameters, the conditional mean outcome and the logging policy (the probability of choosing an action), is crucial in causal inference. This paper proposes a DR estimator for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Masahiro Kato , Shota Yasui , Kenichiro McAlinn

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq

Addressing such diverse ends as safety alignment with human preferences, and the efficiency of learning, a growing line of reinforcement learning research focuses on risk functionals that depend on the entire distribution of returns. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Audrey Huang , Liu Leqi , Zachary Chase Lipton , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Yudai Hayashi , Shuhei Goda , Yuta Saito

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of an evaluation policy, $\pi_e$, using a fixed dataset, $\mathcal{D}$, collected by one or more policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna