Related papers: Multiple-policy Evaluation via Density Estimation
We study quantile-optimal policy learning where the goal is to find a policy whose reward distribution has the largest $\alpha$-quantile for some $\alpha \in (0, 1)$. We focus on the offline setting whose generating process involves…
We consider the off-policy estimation problem of estimating the expected reward of a target policy using samples collected by a different behavior policy. Importance sampling (IS) has been a key technique to derive (nearly) unbiased…
We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC perspective to…
We revisit the identification of an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In such MDPs, two measures of complexity have appeared in the literature: the diameter, $D$, and the optimal bias span, $H$,…
The presence of uncertainty in policy evaluation significantly complicates the process of policy ranking and selection in real-world settings. We formally consider offline policy selection as learning preferences over a set of policy…
We study the problem of estimating the distribution of the return of a policy using an offline dataset that is not generated from the policy, i.e., distributional offline policy evaluation (OPE). We propose an algorithm called Fitted…
We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…
Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…
Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…
We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…
Evaluating the causal impacts of possible interventions is crucial for informing decision-making, especially towards improving access to opportunity. However, if causal effects are heterogeneous and predictable from covariates, personalized…
Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem…
We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…
Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of off-policy policy improvement algorithms with state-action density ratio correction under function approximation setting, where the objective function is formulated as a max-max-min…
In the Markov decision process model, policies are usually evaluated by expected cumulative rewards. As this decision criterion is not always suitable, we propose in this paper an algorithm for computing a policy optimal for the quantile…
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)…
In many real-world reinforcement learning applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed dataset, instead of direct (online) interaction with the environment. When using this data for either evaluation or training of a new…
Infinite horizon off-policy policy evaluation is a highly challenging task due to the excessively large variance of typical importance sampling (IS) estimators. Recently, Liu et al. (2018a) proposed an approach that significantly reduces…
We consider a multi-process remote estimation system observing $K$ independent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. In this system, a shared sensor samples the $K$ processes in such a way that the long-term average sum mean square error (MSE) is…