Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation from Logged Human Feedback
It is well known that the historical logs are used for evaluating and learning policies in interactive systems, e.g. recommendation, search, and online advertising. Since direct online policy learning usually harms user experiences, it is…
Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…
We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…
Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…
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…
Many sequential decision-making systems leverage data collected using prior policies to propose a new policy. For critical applications, it is important that high-confidence guarantees on the new policy's behavior are provided before…
Algorithmic decision-making in practice must be fair for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. To achieve this, prior research has contributed various approaches that ensure fairness in machine learning predictions, while comparatively…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately evaluate the performance of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data. Although many estimators have been developed, there is no single estimator that dominates the others, because…
This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…
We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…
In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…
We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…
Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…
This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…
The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…