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Related papers: Matching-Based Policy Learning

200 papers

In this paper, we explore optimal treatment allocation policies that target distributional welfare. Most literature on treatment choice has considered utilitarian welfare based on the conditional average treatment effect (ATE). While…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-30 Yifan Cui , Sukjin Han

Existing weighting methods for treatment effect estimation are often built upon the idea of propensity scores or covariate balance. They usually impose strong assumptions on treatment assignment or outcome model to obtain unbiased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Dongcheng Zhang , Kunpeng Zhang

We aim to create the highest possible quality of treatment-control matches for categorical data in the potential outcomes framework. Matching methods are heavily used in the social sciences due to their interpretability, but most matching…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-11 Yameng Liu , Aw Dieng , Sudeepa Roy , Cynthia Rudin , Alexander Volfovsky

Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benefits to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Matthew McLeod , Chunlok Lo , Matthew Schlegel , Andrew Jacobsen , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White , Adam White

This paper develops a policy learning method for tuning a pre-trained policy to adapt to additional tasks without altering the original task. A method named Adaptive Policy Gradient (APG) is proposed in this paper, which combines Bellman's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Wenjian Hao , Zehui Lu , Zihao Liang , Tianyu Zhou , Shaoshuai Mou

Decision makers often aim to learn a treatment assignment policy under a capacity constraint on the number of agents that they can treat. When agents can respond strategically to such policies, competition arises, complicating estimation of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-31 Roshni Sahoo , Stefan Wager

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither

This paper studies the problem of optimally allocating treatments in the presence of spillover effects, using information from a (quasi-)experiment. I introduce a method that maximizes the sample analog of average social welfare when…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-04-09 Davide Viviano

We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Konstantin Hess , Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Ezinne Nwankwo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

Value function factorization methods are commonly used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, with QMIX receiving significant attention. Many QMIX-based methods introduce monotonicity constraints between the joint action value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Chang Huang , Shatong Zhu , Junqiao Zhao , Hongtu Zhou , Chen Ye , Tiantian Feng , Changjun Jiang

One primary goal of precision medicine is to estimate the individualized treatment rules (ITRs) that optimize patients' health outcomes based on individual characteristics. Health studies with multiple treatments are commonly seen in…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-07 Xuqiao Li , Qiuyan Zhou , Ying Wu , Ying Yan

When estimating causal effects using observational data, it is desirable to replicate a randomized experiment as closely as possible by obtaining treated and control groups with similar covariate distributions. This goal can often be…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-10-28 Elizabeth A. Stuart

Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Xiaobei Wang , Shuchang Liu , Qingpeng Cai , Xiang Li , Lantao Hu , Han li , Guangming Xie

Many major works in social science employ matching to make causal conclusions, but different matches on the same data may produce different treatment effect estimates, even when they achieve similar balance or minimize the same loss…

Applications · Statistics 2023-03-23 Marco Morucci , Cynthia Rudin

In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-01-04 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

Successfully addressing a wide variety of tasks is a core ability of autonomous agents, requiring flexibly adapting the underlying decision-making strategies and, as we argue in this work, also adapting the perception modules. An analogical…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Pierre Marza , Laetitia Matignon , Olivier Simonin , Christian Wolf

Solving multi-objective optimization problems is important in various applications where users are interested in obtaining optimal policies subject to multiple, yet often conflicting objectives. A typical approach to obtain optimal policies…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-10-07 Huixin Zhan , Yongcan Cao

This paper studies policy learning for continuous treatments from observational data. Continuous treatments present more significant challenges than discrete ones because population welfare may need nonparametric estimation, and policy…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-12-02 Chunrong Ai , Yue Fang , Haitian Xie