English
Related papers

Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation for Large Action Spaces via …

200 papers

We study high-confidence behavior-agnostic off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate a confidence interval on a target policy's value, given only access to a static experience dataset collected by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Bo Dai , Ofir Nachum , Yinlam Chow , Lihong Li , Csaba Szepesvári , Dale Schuurmans

Off-policy learning in dynamic decision problems is essential for providing strong evidence that a new policy is better than the one in use. But how can we prove superiority without testing the new policy? To answer this question, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-12 Assaf Hallak , François Schnitzler , Timothy Mann , Shie Mannor

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-10 Han Wang , Yang Xu , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

While on-policy algorithms are known for their stability, they often demand a substantial number of samples. In contrast, off-policy algorithms, which leverage past experiences, are considered sample-efficient but tend to exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Jianfei Ma

Deep reinforcement learning has been able to solve various tasks successfully, however, due to the construction of policy gradient and training dynamics, tuning deep reinforcement learning models remains challenging. As one of the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hanyong Wang , Menglong Yang

The principal contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework for off-policy reinforcement learning, based on conditional expectations of importance sampling ratios. This framework yields new perspectives and understanding of existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Hado van Hasselt , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul , Rémi Munos , Will Dabney

We study the problem of off-policy policy evaluation (OPPE) in RL. In contrast to prior work, we consider how to estimate both the individual policy value and average policy value accurately. We draw inspiration from recent work in causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Aniruddh Raghu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

We consider off-policy policy evaluation when the trajectory data are generated by multiple behavior policies. Recent work has shown the key role played by the state or state-action stationary distribution corrections in the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Xinyun Chen , Lu Wang , Yizhe Hang , Heng Ge , Hongyuan Zha

Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Dongdong Li , Jiuxiang Dong

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is one of the most fundamental problems in reinforcement learning (RL) to estimate the expected long-term payoff of a given target policy with only experiences from another behavior policy that is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Yang Hu , Tianyi Chen , Na Li , Kai Wang , Bo Dai

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Yihong Guo , Hao Liu , Yisong Yue , Anqi Liu

This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qianyi Chen , Ying Chen , Bo Li

This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Wesley Suttle , Zhuoran Yang , Kaiqing Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Tamer Basar , Ji Liu

This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Inspired by the two-way fixed effects regression model widely used in the panel data literature, we propose a two-way unmeasured confounding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Shuguang Yu , Shuxing Fang , Ruixin Peng , Zhengling Qi , Fan Zhou , Chengchun Shi

Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Yusuke Narita , Kyohei Okumura , Akihiro Shimizu , Kohei Yata

We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare , Tom Stepleton , Remi Munos

Model-based offline reinforcement learning trains policies using pre-collected datasets and learned environment models, eliminating the need for direct real-world environment interaction. However, this paradigm is inherently challenged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Wang Luo , Haoran Li , Zicheng Zhang , Congying Han , Chi Zhou , Jiayu Lv , Tiande Guo

Policy evaluation is a crucial step in many reinforcement-learning procedures, which estimates a value function that predicts states' long-term value under a given policy. In this paper, we focus on policy evaluation with linear function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-12 Simon S. Du , Jianshu Chen , Lihong Li , Lin Xiao , Dengyong Zhou