English
Related papers

Related papers: Bayesian Off-Policy Evaluation and Learning for La…

200 papers

A fundamental challenge in model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) lies in the trade-off between generalization and robustness against exploitation errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions. While OOD samples may capture valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongqiang Lin , Dongxu Zhang , Yiding Sun , Mingzhe Li , Ning Yang , Haijun Zhang

Off-policy evaluation and learning in contextual bandits use logged interaction data to estimate and optimize the value of a target policy. Most existing methods require sufficient action overlap between the logging and target policies, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Shu Tamano

Offline model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) serves as a competitive framework that can learn well-performing policies solely from pre-collected data with the help of learned dynamics models. To fully unleash the power of offline MBRL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yu-Wei Yang , Yun-Ming Chan , Wei Hung , Xi Liu , Ping-Chun Hsieh

Automated decision-making algorithms drive applications such as recommendation systems and search engines. These algorithms often rely on off-policy contextual bandits or off-policy learning (OPL). Conventionally, OPL selects actions that…

Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Yudai Hayashi , Shuhei Goda , Yuta Saito

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

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a contextual bandit policy prior to deployment. As such, OPE plays a critical role in ensuring safety in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. However, standard OPE approaches are limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Aishwarya Mandyam , Kalyani Limaye , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emily Alsentzer

Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Sunil Gupta , A. Tuan Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

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 (RL) aims to extract near-optimal policies from imperfect offline data without additional environment interactions. Extracting policies from diverse offline datasets has the potential to expand the range of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Catherine Cang , Aravind Rajeswaran , Pieter Abbeel , Michael Laskin

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

In real-world recommender systems and search engines, optimizing ranking decisions to present a ranked list of relevant items is critical. Off-policy evaluation (OPE) for ranking policies is thus gaining a growing interest because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-04 Haruka Kiyohara , Yuta Saito , Tatsuya Matsuhiro , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto

Offline reinforcement learning enables agents to leverage large pre-collected datasets of environment transitions to learn control policies, circumventing the need for potentially expensive or unsafe online data collection. Significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Cong Lu , Philip J. Ball , Jack Parker-Holder , Michael A. Osborne , Stephen J. Roberts

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 policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Allen Nie , Yash Chandak , Christina J. Yuan , Anirudhan Badrinath , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskil

Estimation of importance sampling weights for off-policy evaluation of contextual bandits often results in imbalance - a mismatch between the desired and the actual distribution of state-action pairs after weighting. In this work we present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Arjun Sondhi , David Arbour , Drew Dimmery

Online field experiments are the gold-standard way of evaluating changes to real-world interactive machine learning systems. Yet our ability to explore complex, multi-dimensional policy spaces - such as those found in recommendation and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-30 Benjamin Letham , Eytan Bakshy

Online planning has proven effective in reinforcement learning (RL) for improving sample efficiency and final performance. However, using planning for environment interaction inevitably introduces a divergence between the collected data and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Guojian Zhan , Likun Wang , Xiangteng Zhang , Jiaxin Gao , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Shengbo Eben Li

This paper introduces a new principled approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits. Unlike previous work, our approach does not derive learning principles from intractable or loose bounds. We analyse the problem through the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Otmane Sakhi , Pierre Alquier , Nicolas Chopin

Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Noveen Sachdeva , Lequn Wang , Dawen Liang , Nathan Kallus , Julian McAuley