Related papers: Two-way Deconfounder for Off-policy Evaluation in …
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…
When decision-makers can directly intervene, policy evaluation algorithms give valid causal estimates. In off-policy evaluation (OPE), there may exist unobserved variables that both impact the dynamics and are used by the unknown behavior…
When observed decisions depend only on observed features, off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) methods for sequential decision making problems can estimate the performance of evaluation policies before deploying them. This assumption is…
Off-Policy Estimation (OPE) methods allow us to learn and evaluate decision-making policies from logged data. This makes them an attractive choice for the offline evaluation of recommender systems, and several recent works have reported…
This work aims to study off-policy evaluation (OPE) under scenarios where two key reinforcement learning (RL) assumptions -- temporal stationarity and individual homogeneity are both violated. To handle the ``double inhomogeneities", we…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
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…
In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…
Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…
In real-world recommender systems and search engines, optimizing ranking decisions to present a ranked list of relevant items is critical. Off-policy evaluation (OPE) for ranking policies is thus gaining a growing interest because it…
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…
Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…
Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…
Offline Reinforcement Learning has attracted much interest in solving the application challenge for traditional reinforcement learning. Offline reinforcement learning uses previously-collected datasets to train agents without any…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…
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…
When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…
Controlled Direct Effect (CDE) is one of the causal estimands used to evaluate both exposure and mediation effects on an outcome. When there are unmeasured confounders existing between the mediator and the outcome, the ordinary…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…