Related papers: Distributional Off-Policy Evaluation for Slate Rec…
This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…
In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…
Off-policy evaluation is a key component of reinforcement learning which evaluates a target policy with offline data collected from behavior policies. It is a crucial step towards safe reinforcement learning and has been used in…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation from batched contextual bandit data with multidimensional actions, often termed slates. The problem is common to recommender systems and user-interface optimization, and it is particularly…
We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…
Off-policy evaluation can leverage logged data to estimate the effectiveness of new policies in e-commerce, search engines, media streaming services, or automatic diagnostic tools in healthcare. However, the performance of baseline…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem…
We apply diffusion strategies to develop a fully-distributed cooperative reinforcement learning algorithm in which agents in a network communicate only with their immediate neighbors to improve predictions about their environment. The…
In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…
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…
When faced with sequential decision-making problems, it is often useful to be able to predict what would happen if decisions were made using a new policy. Those predictions must often be based on data collected under some previously used…
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…
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…
Off-policy evaluation estimates how a target policy would perform using data collected by a different behavior policy, which is crucial when online testing is costly or risky, such as in recommendation or healthcare. Standard importance…
We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We benchmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational…
When performing imitation learning from expert demonstrations, distribution matching is a popular approach, in which one alternates between estimating distribution ratios and then using these ratios as rewards in a standard reinforcement…
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…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…