Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation for Large Action Spaces via …
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice…
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…
The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…
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 propose a robust regression approach to off-policy evaluation (OPE) for contextual bandits. We frame OPE as a covariate-shift problem and leverage modern robust regression tools. Ours is a general approach that can be used to augment any…
We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
Many off-policy prediction learning algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, but it remains unclear which algorithms learn faster than others. We empirically compare 11 off-policy prediction learning algorithms with linear function…
Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…
A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…
Off-policy evaluation and learning in contextual bandits use logged interaction data to estimate and optimize the value of a target policy. Most existing methods require sufficient action overlap between the logging and target policies, and…
Many sequential decision making problems are high-stakes and require off-policy evaluation (OPE) of a new policy using historical data collected using some other policy. One of the most common OPE techniques that provides unbiased estimates…
Existing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on an explicit state-action-value function representation, which can be problematic in high-dimensional action spaces due to the curse of dimensionality. This reliance results…
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…
Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…
Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…
Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…
Importance sampling (IS) is often used to perform off-policy policy evaluation but is prone to several issues, especially when the behavior policy is unknown and must be estimated from data. Significant differences between the target and…
Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale…