Related papers: Kernel Metric Learning for In-Sample Off-Policy Ev…

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…

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…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits with finite action space. Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) weighting is a widely used method for OPE due to its unbiased, but it suffers from significant variance when the action…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns effective policies from a static target dataset. The performance of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms notwithstanding, it relies on the size of the target dataset, and it degrades if limited…

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR)…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…

We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

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,…

Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…

This article presents a general framework for the transport of probability measures towards minimum divergence generative modeling and sampling using ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHSs),…

We introduce a novel kernel-based framework for learning differential equations and their solution maps that is efficient in data requirements, in terms of solution examples and amount of measurements from each example, and computational…

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…

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

In recent years, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to many different continuous control tasks. While RL algorithms are often conceptually simple, their state-of-the-art implementations take numerous low-…

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…