Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation with Irregularly-Spaced, Out…
Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem…
In many practical applications, decision-making processes must balance the costs of acquiring information with the benefits it provides. Traditional control systems often assume full observability, an unrealistic assumption when…
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)…
Off-policy learning in dynamic decision problems is essential for providing strong evidence that a new policy is better than the one in use. But how can we prove superiority without testing the new policy? To answer this question, we…
Model-based methods have recently shown great potential for off-policy evaluation (OPE); offline trajectories induced by behavioral policies are fitted to transitions of Markov decision processes (MDPs), which are used to rollout simulated…
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…
We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the problem of slate contextual bandits where a policy selects multi-dimensional actions known as slates. This problem is widespread in recommender systems, search engines, marketing, to medical…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods allow us to compute the expected reward of a policy by using the logged data collected by a different policy. OPE is a viable alternative to running expensive online A/B tests: it can speed up the…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…
This paper demonstrates the successful application of Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) to accelerate recommender system development and optimization at Adyen, a global leader in financial payment processing. Facing the limitations of traditional…
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…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic target policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with continuous action spaces. While it is common to use importance sampling for OPE, it suffers from high variance…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the performance of hypothetical policies using data generated by a different policy. Because of its huge potential impact in practice, there has been growing research interest in this field.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to transform real-world decision-making systems by enabling autonomous agents to learn from experience. Deploying RL in real-world settings, especially in the context of human-robot interaction,…
Optimal decision-making presents a significant challenge for autonomous systems operating in uncertain, stochastic and time-varying environments. Environmental variability over time can significantly impact the system's optimal decision…
Clinical decision support tools rooted in machine learning and optimization can provide significant value to healthcare providers, including through better management of intensive care units. In particular, it is important that the patient…
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,…
We explore off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) in contextual combinatorial bandits (CCB), where a policy selects a subset in the action space. For example, it might choose a set of furniture pieces (a bed and a drawer) from available…
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 aim of this paper is to establish a causal link between the policies implemented by technology companies and the outcomes they yield within intricate temporal and/or spatial dependent experiments. We propose a novel…