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Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation from Logged Human Feedback

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Off-policy evaluation learns a target policy's value with a historical dataset generated by a different behavior policy. In addition to a point estimate, many applications would benefit significantly from having a confidence interval (CI)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-09 Chengchun Shi , Runzhe Wan , Victor Chernozhukov , Rui Song

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Off-policy learning is a framework for evaluating and optimizing policies without deploying them, from data collected by another policy. Real-world environments are typically non-stationary and the offline learned policies should adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed

We study off-policy evaluation and learning from sequential data in a structured class of Markov decision processes that arise from repeated interactions with an exogenous sequence of arrivals with contexts, which generate unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Nathan Kallus , Angela Zhou

Randomized trials, also known as A/B tests, are used to select between two policies: a control and a treatment. Given a corresponding set of features, we can ideally learn an optimized policy P that maps the A/B test data features to action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Elon Portugaly , Joseph J. Pfeiffer

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Masahiro Kato , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Shota Yasui

Many web systems rank and present a list of items to users, from recommender systems to search and advertising. An important problem in practice is to evaluate new ranking policies offline and optimize them before they are deployed. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Shuai Li , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Branislav Kveton , S. Muthukrishnan , Vishwa Vinay , Zheng Wen

We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Germano Gabbianelli , Matteo Papini , Gergely Neu

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Imad Aouali , Otmane Sakhi

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

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Teng Xiao , Suhang Wang

Many reinforcement learning applications involve the use of data that is sensitive, such as medical records of patients or financial information. However, most current reinforcement learning methods can leak information contained within the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-04 Tengyang Xie , Philip S. Thomas , Gerome Miklau

Accurately evaluating new policies (e.g. ad-placement models, ranking functions, recommendation functions) is one of the key prerequisites for improving interactive systems. While the conventional approach to evaluation relies on online A/B…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Aman Agarwal , Soumya Basu , Tobias Schnabel , Thorsten Joachims

Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Lucas Lehnert , Doina Precup

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment. These are critical shortcomings for applying RL to real-world problems where…

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

Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Da Xu , Yuting Ye , Chuanwei Ruan , Bo Yang

Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Sarthak Ahuja , Mohammad Kachuee , Fateme Sheikholeslami , Weiqing Liu , Jaeyoung Do

Off-policy evaluation is critical in a number of applications where new policies need to be evaluated offline before online deployment. Most existing methods focus on the expected return, define the target parameter through averaging and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-10 Yingying Zhang , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo