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Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation from Logged Human Feedback

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What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-07 Yusuke Narita , Shota Yasui , Kohei Yata

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

This paper addresses the problem of policy selection in domains with abundant logged data, but with a restricted interaction budget. Solving this problem would enable safe evaluation and deployment of offline reinforcement learning policies…

Off-policy learning and evaluation leverage logged bandit feedback datasets, which contain context, action, propensity score, and feedback for each data point. These scenarios face significant challenges due to high variance and poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Armin Behnamnia , Gholamali Aminian , Alireza Aghaei , Chengchun Shi , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Hamid R. Rabiee

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel

In this work, we consider the problem of estimating a behaviour policy for use in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation (OPE) when the true behaviour policy is unknown. Via a series of empirical studies, we demonstrate how accurate OPE is strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Aniruddh Raghu , Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most vibrant research frontiers in machine learning and has been recently applied to solve a number of challenging problems. In this paper, we primarily focus on off-policy evaluation (OPE), one of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-14 Masatoshi Uehara , Chengchun Shi , Nathan Kallus

Before A/B testing online a new version of a recommender system, it is usual to perform some offline evaluations on historical data. We focus on evaluation methods that compute an estimator of the potential uplift in revenue that could…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Alexandre Gilotte , Clément Calauzènes , Thomas Nedelec , Alexandre Abraham , Simon Dollé

Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Bernhard Schölkopf , Sergey Levine

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Yuta Saito , Takuma Udagawa , Kei Tateno

Off-policy reinforcement learning has many applications including: learning from demonstration, learning multiple goal seeking policies in parallel, and representing predictive knowledge. Recently there has been an proliferation of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-01 Adam White , Martha White

How can we train a dialog model to produce better conversations by learning from human feedback, without the risk of humans teaching it harmful chat behaviors? We start by hosting models online, and gather human feedback from real-time,…

Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Nathaniel D. Bastian , Bruno Castro da Silva , Emma Brunskil , Philip S. Thomas

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

The dynamic portfolio optimization problem in finance frequently requires learning policies that adhere to various constraints, driven by investor preferences and risk. We motivate this problem of finding an allocation policy within a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Nymisha Bandi , Theja Tulabandhula

Off-policy evaluation often refers to two related tasks: estimating the expected return of a policy and estimating its value function (or other functions of interest, such as density ratios). While recent works on marginalized importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Audrey Huang , Nan Jiang

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