Related papers: Improved Offline Contextual Bandits with Second-Or…
This paper introduces a new principled approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits. Unlike previous work, our approach does not derive learning principles from intractable or loose bounds. We analyse the problem through the…
The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…
We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…
Off-policy learning is a framework for evaluating and optimizing policies without deploying them, from data collected by another policy. Real-world environments are typically non-stationary and the offline learned policies should adapt to…
Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…
We consider off-policy evaluation in the contextual bandit setting for the purpose of obtaining a robust off-policy selection strategy, where the selection strategy is evaluated based on the value of the chosen policy in a set of proposal…
We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…
We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse…
This paper studies the off-policy evaluation problem, where one aims to estimate the value of a target policy based on a sample of observations collected by another policy. We first consider the multi-armed bandit case, establish a minimax…
We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
Offline contextual bandits allow one to learn policies from historical/offline data without requiring online interaction. However, offline policy optimization that maximizes overall expected rewards can unintentionally amplify the reward…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
We develop confidence bounds that hold uniformly over time for off-policy evaluation in the contextual bandit setting. These confidence sequences are based on recent ideas from martingale analysis and are non-asymptotic, non-parametric, and…
Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
Most off-policy evaluation methods for contextual bandits have focused on the expected outcome of a policy, which is estimated via methods that at best provide only asymptotic guarantees. However, in many applications, the expectation may…
We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions,…