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The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-03 Yang Xu , Jin Zhu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Rui Song

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the performance of a target policy using offline data collected from a behavior policy, and is crucial in domains such as robotics or healthcare where direct interaction with the environment is costly…

Policy evaluation is a crucial step in many reinforcement-learning procedures, which estimates a value function that predicts states' long-term value under a given policy. In this paper, we focus on policy evaluation with linear function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-12 Simon S. Du , Jianshu Chen , Lihong Li , Lin Xiao , Dengyong Zhou

We study the problem of off-policy policy evaluation (OPPE) in RL. In contrast to prior work, we consider how to estimate both the individual policy value and average policy value accurately. We draw inspiration from recent work in causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Aniruddh Raghu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

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

We develop stochastic first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems. When the saddle function is strongly convex in the primal variable, we develop the first stochastic restart scheme for this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-13 Renbo Zhao

We consider empirical risk minimization of linear predictors with convex loss functions. Such problems can be reformulated as convex-concave saddle point problems, and thus are well suitable for primal-dual first-order algorithms. However,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-03-09 Jialei Wang , Lin Xiao

In real-world applications with large state and action spaces, reinforcement learning (RL) typically employs function approximations to represent core components like the policies, value functions, and dynamics models. Although powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Chenxiao Gao , Haotian Sun , Na Li , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a critical challenge of overestimating the value of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing methods mitigate this issue by penalizing unseen samples, yet they fail to accurately identify OOD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qingjun Wang , Hongtu Zhou , Hang Yu , Junqiao Zhao , Yanping Zhao , Chen Ye , Ziqiao Wang , Guang Chen

Optimal control problems with nonsmooth objectives and nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) constraints are challenging, mainly because of the underlying nonsmooth and nonconvex structures and the demanding computational cost for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-25 Yongcun Song , Xiaoming Yuan , Hangrui Yue , Tianyou Zeng

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

Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Tengyang Xie , Yifei Ma , Yu-Xiang Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift problem. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated policy constraints between the learned policy and the behavior policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Yang Yue , Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Qisen Yang , Gao Huang , Shiji Song , Shuicheng Yan

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) serves as one of the cornerstones in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE) with various function approximators, especially deep neural networks, has gained practical success. While statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Ruiqi Zhang , Xuezhou Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Mengdi Wang

Among the reasons hindering reinforcement learning (RL) applications to real-world problems, two factors are critical: limited data and the mismatch between the testing environment (real environment in which the policy is deployed) and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Xiaoteng Ma , Zhipeng Liang , Jose Blanchet , Mingwen Liu , Li Xia , Jiheng Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Yudai Hayashi , Shuhei Goda , Yuta Saito

Representation learning often plays a critical role in reinforcement learning by managing the curse of dimensionality. A representative class of algorithms exploits a spectral decomposition of the stochastic transition dynamics to construct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Tongzheng Ren , Tianjun Zhang , Lisa Lee , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to constraints on expected cumulative cost using an existing dataset. In this paper, we propose Primal-Dual-Critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Kihyuk Hong , Yuhang Li , Ambuj Tewari

As machine learning becomes increasingly prevalent in impactful decisions, recognizing when inference data is outside the model's expected input distribution is paramount for giving context to predictions. Out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Anish Lakkapragada , Amol Khanna , Edward Raff , Nathan Inkawhich