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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-18 Connor Douglas , Joel Persson , Foster Provost

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, particularly in the experience replay setting now commonly used with deep neural networks. Classically, off-policy estimation bias is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

Reinforcement learning is well suited for optimizing policies of recommender systems. Current solutions mostly focus on model-free approaches, which require frequent interactions with the real environment, and thus are expensive in model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Xueying Bai , Jian Guan , Hongning Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to learn optimal policies with access only to trajectories in a fixed dataset. Policy constraint methods formulate policy learning as an optimization problem that balances maximizing reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Padmanaba Srinivasan , William Knottenbelt

This paper formalises the problem of online algorithm selection in the context of Reinforcement Learning. The setup is as follows: given an episodic task and a finite number of off-policy RL algorithms, a meta-algorithm has to decide which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-16 Romain Laroche , Raphael Feraud

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-14 Tatsuki Takahashi , Chihiro Maru , Hiroko Shoji

This work aims to study off-policy evaluation (OPE) under scenarios where two key reinforcement learning (RL) assumptions -- temporal stationarity and individual homogeneity are both violated. To handle the ``double inhomogeneities", we…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-20 Zeyu Bian , Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Lan Wang

Offline reinforcement learning, which seeks to utilize offline/historical data to optimize sequential decision-making strategies, has gained surging prominence in recent studies. Due to the advantage that appropriate function approximators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Ming Yin , Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are a crucial tool for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where exploration is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. However, the extent to which such methods can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Elita Lobo , Harvineet Singh , Marek Petrik , Cynthia Rudin , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Autonomous exploration has many important applications. However, classic information gain-based or frontier-based exploration only relies on the robot current state to determine the immediate exploration goal, which lacks the capability of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Yafei Hu , Junyi Geng , Chen Wang , John Keller , Sebastian Scherer

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

We present an online model-based reinforcement learning algorithm suitable for controlling complex robotic systems directly in the real world. Unlike prevailing sim-to-real pipelines that rely on extensive offline simulation and model-free…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Fang Nan , Hao Ma , Qinghua Guan , Josie Hughes , Michael Muehlebach , Marco Hutter

The goal of offline reinforcement learning is to learn a policy from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. This setting will be an increasingly more important paradigm for real-world applications of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Wenxuan Zhou , Sujay Bajracharya , David Held

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xiao-Yin Liu , Guotao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Zeng-Guang Hou

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we seek to utilize offline data to evaluate (or learn) policies in scenarios where the data are collected from a distribution that substantially differs from that of the target policy to be evaluated.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ruosong Wang , Yifan Wu , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sham M. Kakade

Modern deep learning heavily relies on large labeled datasets, which often comse with high costs in terms of both manual labeling and computational resources. To mitigate these challenges, researchers have explored the use of informative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-07 Yong Lin , Chen Liu , Chenlu Ye , Qing Lian , Yuan Yao , Tong Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a significant challenge of distribution shift. Model-free offline RL penalizes the Q value for out-of-distribution (OOD) data or constrains the policy closed to the behavior policy to tackle this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Xiao-Yin Liu , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Guotao Li , Hao Li , Mei-Jiang Gui , Tian-Yu Xiang , De-Xing Huang , Zeng-Guang Hou

Learning high-quality $Q$-value functions plays a key role in the success of many modern off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Previous works primarily focus on addressing the value overestimation issue, an outcome of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Tianying Ji , Yu Luo , Fuchun Sun , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianwei Zhang , Huazhe Xu

Offline policy learning aims to use historical data to learn an optimal personalized decision rule. In the standard estimate-then-optimize framework, reweighting-based methods (e.g., inverse propensity weighting or doubly robust estimators)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Jingren Liu , Hanzhang Qin , Junyi Liu , Mabel C. Chou , Jong-Shi Pang