Related papers: On The Statistical Complexity of Offline Decision-…
We study contextual online pricing with biased offline data. For the scalar price elasticity case, we identify the instance-dependent quantity $\delta^2$ that measures how far the offline data lies from the (unknown) online optimum. We show…
We study regret minimization in online episodic linear Markov Decision Processes, and obtain rate-optimal $\widetilde O (\sqrt K)$ regret where $K$ denotes the number of episodes. Our work is the first to establish the optimal (w.r.t.~$K$)…
What can an agent learn in a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem from a dataset that contains just a single sample for each arm? Surprisingly, in this work, we demonstrate that even in such a data-starved setting it may still be…
Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…
We present a model-based offline reinforcement learning policy performance lower bound that explicitly captures dynamics model misspecification and distribution mismatch and we propose an empirical algorithm for optimal offline policy…
Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…
A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the…
Semi-online algorithms that are allowed to perform a bounded amount of repacking achieve guaranteed good worst-case behaviour in a more realistic setting. Most of the previous works focused on minimization problems that aim to minimize some…
We study the offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) problem, where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP) using the data coming from a policy $\mu$. In particular, we consider the…
The training of autonomous agents often requires expensive and unsafe trial-and-error interactions with the environment. Nowadays several data sets containing recorded experiences of intelligent agents performing various tasks, spanning…
We study a novel setting in offline reinforcement learning (RL) where a number of distributed machines jointly cooperate to solve the problem but only one single round of communication is allowed and there is a budget constraint on the…
With the fast development of big data, learning the optimal decision rule by recursively updating it and making online decisions has been easier than before. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual…
We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…
Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…
We study online convex optimization in the random order model, recently proposed by \citet{garber2020online}, where the loss functions may be chosen by an adversary, but are then presented to the online algorithm in a uniformly random…
We study the problems of offline and online contextual optimization with feedback information, where instead of observing the loss, we observe, after-the-fact, the optimal action an oracle with full knowledge of the objective function would…
This paper studies the approximation of optimal control policies by quantized (discretized) policies for a very general class of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The problem is motivated by applications in networked control systems,…
The study of online decision-making problems that leverage contextual information has drawn notable attention due to their significant applications in fields ranging from healthcare to autonomous systems. In modern applications, contextual…
This paper aims to motivate stochastic optimization problems from a statistical perspective and a statistical learning perspective, where the goal is to maximize the log-likelihood or minimize the population risk. We briefly describe the…
Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…