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Offline reinforcement learning algorithms often require careful hyperparameter tuning. Before deployment, we need to select amongst a set of candidate policies. However, there is limited understanding about the fundamental limits of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Vincent Liu , Prabhat Nagarajan , Andrew Patterson , Martha White

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-04 Haruka Kiyohara , Yuta Saito , Tatsuya Matsuhiro , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto

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

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy using historical data collected under a different logging policy. OPE methods typically assume overlap between the target and logging policy, enabling…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-12 Samir Khan , Martin Saveski , Johan Ugander

Counterfactual estimators are critical for learning and refining policies using logged data, a process known as Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE). OPE allows researchers to assess new policies without costly experiments, speeding up the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Ritam Guha , Nilavra Pathak

In offline-to-online reinforcement learning (O2O-RL), policies are first safely trained offline using previously collected datasets and then further fine-tuned for tasks via limited online interactions. In a typical O2O-RL pipeline,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Xiaoan Xu , Shangtong Zhang , Miroslav Pajic , Yuichi Motai

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to assess the effectiveness of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data and is often used to identify the top-k promising policies for deployment in online A/B tests. Existing evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Haruka Kiyohara , Ren Kishimoto , Kosuke Kawakami , Ken Kobayashi , Kazuhide Nakata , Yuta Saito

While the classic off-policy evaluation (OPE) literature commonly assumes decision time points to be evenly spaced for simplicity, in many real-world scenarios, such as those involving user-initiated visits, decisions are made at…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-17 Xin Chen , Wenbin Lu , Shu Yang , Dipankar Bandyopadhyay

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Hoang M. Le , Cameron Voloshin , Yisong Yue

Personalized preference alignment for LLMs with diverse human preferences requires evaluation and alignment methods that capture pluralism. Most existing preference alignment datasets are logged under policies that differ substantially from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Chengkai Huang , Junda Wu , Zhouhang Xie , Yu Xia , Rui Wang , Tong Yu , Subrata Mitra , Julian McAuley , Lina Yao

We are concerned with the problem of hyperparameter selection for the fitted Q-evaluation (FQE). FQE is one of the state-of-the-art method for offline policy evaluation (OPE), which is essential to the reinforcement learning without…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-21 Kohei Miyaguchi

Statistical models for networks with complex dependencies pose particular challenges for model selection and evaluation. In particular, many well-established statistical tools for selecting between models assume conditional independence of…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-08-20 Fan Yin , Nolan Edward Phillips , Carter T. Butts

Online A/B testing, the gold standard for evaluating new advertising policies, consumes substantial engineering resources and risks significant revenue loss from deploying underperforming variations. This motivates the use of Off-Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Hongseon Yeom , Jaeyoul Shin , Soojin Min , Jeongmin Yoon , Seunghak Yu , Dongyeop Kang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Kefan Dong , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Allen Nie , Emma Brunskill

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq

In reinforcement learning, off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the expected return of an evaluation policy given a fixed dataset that was collected by running one or more different policies. One of the more empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Imad Aouali , Otmane Sakhi

We study the problem of estimating the distribution of the return of a policy using an offline dataset that is not generated from the policy, i.e., distributional offline policy evaluation (OPE). We propose an algorithm called Fitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Runzhe Wu , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun