Related papers: Distributional Off-Policy Evaluation for Slate Rec…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…
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…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…
Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…
Many real-world problems require trading off multiple competing objectives. However, these objectives are often in different units and/or scales, which can make it challenging for practitioners to express numerical preferences over…
Recent research has employed reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to optimize long-term user engagement in recommender systems, thereby avoiding common pitfalls such as user boredom and filter bubbles. They capture the sequential and…
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…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…
We introduce a distributionally robust approach that enhances the reliability of offline policy evaluation in contextual bandits under general covariate shifts. Our method aims to deliver robust policy evaluation results in the presence of…
In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…
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…
Users of music streaming, video streaming, news recommendation, and e-commerce services often engage with content in a sequential manner. Providing and evaluating good sequences of recommendations is therefore a central problem for these…
Motivated by the poor performance of cross-validation in settings where data are scarce, we propose a novel estimator of the out-of-sample performance of a policy in data-driven optimization.Our approach exploits the optimization problem's…
This study proposes the use of a social learning method to estimate a global state within a multi-agent off-policy actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) operating in a partially observable environment. We assume that the…
Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…
Learning from Observations (LfO) is a practical reinforcement learning scenario from which many applications can benefit through the reuse of incomplete resources. Compared to conventional imitation learning (IL), LfO is more challenging…
Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…
Off-policy estimation for long-horizon problems is important in many real-life applications such as healthcare and robotics, where high-fidelity simulators may not be available and on-policy evaluation is expensive or impossible. Recently,…
The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…