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Evaluating policies using off-policy data is crucial for applying reinforcement learning to real-world problems such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Previous methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) generally suffer from high variance…
When observed decisions depend only on observed features, off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) methods for sequential decision making problems can estimate the performance of evaluation policies before deploying them. This assumption is…
Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on learning policies solely from a batch of previously collected data. offering the potential to leverage such datasets effectively without the need for costly or risky active exploration. While…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables and the behavior policy depends on unobservable latent variables. Existing…
Offline reinforcement learning algorithms often require careful hyperparameter tuning. Before deployment, we need to select amongst a set of candidate policies. However, there is limited understanding about the fundamental limits of this…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…
Incorporating prior data into online reinforcement learning accelerates training but typically forces a difficult trade-off between high computational costs and long, multi-stage training pipelines. While fixed-length stabilization phases…
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…
The problem of on-line off-policy evaluation (OPE) has been actively studied in the last decade due to its importance both as a stand-alone problem and as a module in a policy improvement scheme. However, most Temporal Difference (TD) based…
We consider local kernel metric learning for off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic policies in contextual bandits with continuous action spaces. Our work is motivated by practical scenarios where the target policy needs to be…
This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…
Fitted $Q$-evaluation (FQE) is a standard regression-based tool for off-policy evaluation, but existing stability guarantees often rely on Bellman completeness, a strong closure condition that can fail under function approximation. We study…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of an evaluation policy, $\pi_e$, using a fixed dataset, $\mathcal{D}$, collected by one or more policies…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
This paper presents a new method to learn online policies in continuous state, continuous action, model-free Markov decision processes, with two properties that are crucial for practical applications. First, the policies are implementable…
Evaluating the value of a hypothetical target policy with only a logged dataset is important but challenging. On the one hand, it brings opportunities for safe policy improvement under high-stakes scenarios like clinical guidelines. On the…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a fundamental task in reinforcement learning (RL). In the classic setting of linear OPE, finite-sample guarantees often take the form $$ \textrm{Evaluation error} \le \textrm{poly}(C^\pi, d,…
Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…
By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…