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The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Olivier Jeunen , Aleksei Ustimenko

We offer an experimental benchmark and empirical study for off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning, which is a key problem in many safety critical applications. Given the increasing interest in deploying learning-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Cameron Voloshin , Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many…

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

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Masahiro Kato , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Shota Yasui

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-03 Yang Xu , Jin Zhu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Rui Song

This paper addresses the problem of policy selection in domains with abundant logged data, but with a restricted interaction budget. Solving this problem would enable safe evaluation and deployment of offline reinforcement learning policies…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the benefit of following a counterfactual sequence of actions, given data collected from executed sequences. However, existing OPE estimators often exhibit high bias and high variance in problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Aaman Rebello , Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens , Sonali Parbhoo

Offline reinforcement learning aims to utilize datasets of previously gathered environment-action interaction records to learn a policy without access to the real environment. Recent work has shown that offline reinforcement learning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Vaneet Aggarwal

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods aim to estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aishwarya Mandyam , Jason Meng , Ge Gao , Jiankai Sun , Mac Schwager , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to transform real-world decision-making systems by enabling autonomous agents to learn from experience. Deploying RL in real-world settings, especially in the context of human-robot interaction,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Saurav Singh , Rodney Sanchez , Alexander Ororbia , Jamison Heard

Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Omer Gottesman , Joseph Futoma , Yao Liu , Sonali Parbhoo , Leo Anthony Celi , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

In this work, we consider the problem of estimating a behaviour policy for use in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation (OPE) when the true behaviour policy is unknown. Via a series of empirical studies, we demonstrate how accurate OPE is strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Aniruddh Raghu , Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

We offer a theoretical characterization of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning using function approximation for marginal importance weights and $q$-functions when these are estimated using recent minimax methods. Under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Masatoshi Uehara , Masaaki Imaizumi , Nan Jiang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun , Tengyang Xie

We consider evaluating and training a new policy for the evaluation data by using the historical data obtained from a different policy. The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to estimate the expected reward of a new policy over the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-19 Masahiro Kato , Masatoshi Uehara , Shota Yasui

This paper investigates the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem from a distributional perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the expectation of the total return, as in most existing OPE methods, we aim to estimate the entire return…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-27 Qi Kuang , Chao Wang , Yuling Jiao , Fan Zhou

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) constructs confidence intervals for the value of a target policy using data generated under a different behavior policy. Most existing inference methods focus on fixed target policies and may fail when the target…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Haoyu Wei

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy using historical data collected under a different logging policy. OPE methods typically assume overlap between the target and logging policy, enabling…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-12 Samir Khan , Martin Saveski , Johan Ugander

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Melrose Roderick , Gaurav Manek , Felix Berkenkamp , J. Zico Kolter

Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Olivier Jeunen