Related papers: Predicting Long Term Sequential Policy Value Using…
This paper investigates the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem from a distributional perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the expectation of the total return, as in most existing OPE methods, we aim to estimate the entire return…
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…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
In many experimental and observational studies, the outcome of interest is often difficult or expensive to observe, reducing effective sample sizes for estimating average treatment effects (ATEs) even when identifiable. We study how…
We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) for episodic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with continuous states. Motivated by the recently proposed proximal causal inference framework, we develop a…
Many sequential decision making problems are high-stakes and require off-policy evaluation (OPE) of a new policy using historical data collected using some other policy. One of the most common OPE techniques that provides unbiased estimates…
Policy evaluation algorithms are essential to reinforcement learning due to their ability to predict the performance of a policy. However, there are two long-standing issues lying in this prediction problem that need to be tackled:…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
We offer an experimental benchmark and empirical study for off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning, which is a key problem in many safety critical applications. Given the increasing interest in deploying learning-based…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…
This paper proposes a new class of distributional causal quantities, referred to as the \textit{outcome conditioned partial policy effects} (OCPPEs), to measure the \textit{average} effect of a general counterfactual intervention of a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been extensively researched for enhancing human-environment interactions in various human-centric tasks, including e-learning and healthcare. Since deploying and evaluating policies online are high-stakes in…
Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables and the behavior policy depends on unobservable latent variables. Existing…
This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist…
The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…
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,…
Using state-level opioid overdose mortality data from 1999-2016, we simulated four time-varying treatment scenarios, which correspond to real-world policy dynamics (ramp up, ramp down, temporary and inconsistent). We then evaluated seven…
The world currently offers an abundance of data in multiple domains, from which we can learn reinforcement learning (RL) policies without further interaction with the environment. RL agents learning offline from such data is possible but…