Related papers: Off-Policy Selection for Initiating Human-Centric …
Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to…
The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained via a behavior policy. However, because the contextual bandit algorithm updates the policy based on past observations, the samples are not…
Large-scale Web-based services present opportunities for improving UI policies based on observed user interactions. We address challenges of learning such policies through model-free offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) with off-policy…
Many real-world reinforcement learning problems have a hierarchical nature, and often exhibit some degree of partial observability. While hierarchy and partial observability are usually tackled separately (for instance by combining…
Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) seeks to address safety constraints by learning from static datasets and restricting exploration. However, these approaches heavily rely on the dataset and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios…
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…
Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…
Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are the conjoining of an entities' physical and computational elements. The development of a typical CPS system follows a sequence from conceptual modeling, testing in simulated (virtual) worlds, testing in…
Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…
Offline algorithms for Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (RLHF), which use only a fixed dataset of sampled responses given an input, and preference feedback among these responses, have gained increasing prominence in the…
Off-policy learning (OPL) in contextual bandits aims to learn a decision-making policy that maximizes the target rewards by using only historical interaction data collected under previously developed policies. Unfortunately, when rewards…
Aligning with human preference datasets has been critical to the success of large language models (LLMs). Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) employs a costly reward model to provide feedback for on-policy sampling responses.…
Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…
The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are typically characterized as algorithms that perform policy updates using i.i.d. trajectories collected by the agent's current policy. However, after observing only a finite number of…
Off-policy learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy ($\pi$) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause…
Due to the diversity and implicit redundancy in terms of processing units and compute kernels, off-the-shelf heterogeneous systems offer the opportunity to detect and tolerate faults during task execution in hardware as well as in software.…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning effective policies from fixed datasets without any environment interaction. Existing methods typically employ policy constraints to mitigate the distribution shift encountered during…
This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…