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The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is an important practical problem in algorithmic ranking systems, where the goal is to estimate the expected performance of a new ranking policy using only offline logged data collected under a different, logging…

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

Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-30 Mohammad Mehrabi , Stefan Wager

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy training and deployment environments are different. To deal with this environmental perturbation, we focus on learning policies robust to uncertainties in transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus , Lihong Li , Ali Mousavi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna

We consider distributed statistical optimization in one-shot setting, where there are $m$ machines each observing $n$ i.i.d. samples. Based on its observed samples, each machine then sends an $O(\log(mn))$-length message to a server, at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Arsalan Sharifnassab , Saber Salehkaleybar , S. Jamaloddin Golestani

When deploying a trained machine learning model in the real world, it is inevitable to receive inputs from out-of-distribution (OOD) sources. For instance, in continual learning settings, it is common to encounter OOD samples due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Chuanwen Feng , Wenlong Chen , Ao Ke , Yilong Ren , Xike Xie , S. Kevin Zhou

Offline model selection (OMS), that is, choosing the best policy from a set of many policies given only logged data, is crucial for applying offline RL in real-world settings. One idea that has been extensively explored is to select…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Joshua P. Zitovsky , Daniel de Marchi , Rishabh Agarwal , Michael R. Kosorok

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-24 Assaf Hallak , Shie Mannor

Off-policy evaluation and learning are concerned with assessing a given policy and learning an optimal policy from offline data without direct interaction with the environment. Often, the environment in which the data are collected differs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Yi Shen , Pan Xu , Michael M. Zavlanos

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

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 study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Nianli Peng , Muhang Tian , Brandon Fain

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) from multiple logging policies, each generating a dataset of fixed size, i.e., stratified sampling. Previous work noted that in this setting the ordering of the variances of different importance sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nathan Kallus , Yuta Saito , Masatoshi Uehara

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-28 Xiaohong Chen , Zhengling Qi

This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider a regression setting where observations are collected in different environments modeled by different data distributions. The field of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization aims to design methods that generalize better to test…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-12 Francesco Freni , Anya Fries , Linus Kühne , Markus Reichstein , Jonas Peters

An interesting phenomenon arises: Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) sometimes outperforms methods specifically designed for out-of-distribution tasks. This motivates an investigation into the reasons behind such behavior beyond algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hong Zheng , Fei Teng