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Related papers: Semiparametric Off-Policy Inference for Optimal Po…

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Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Yuta Saito , Thorsten Joachims

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 David Bruns-Smith

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is important for closing the gap between offline training and evaluation of reinforcement learning (RL), by estimating performance and/or rank of target (evaluation) policies using offline trajectories only. It…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Qitong Gao , Ge Gao , Juncheng Dong , Vahid Tarokh , Min Chi , Miroslav Pajic

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is an important practical problem in algorithmic ranking systems, where the goal is to estimate the expected performance of a new ranking policy using only offline logged data collected under a different, logging…

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) serves as one of the cornerstones in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE) with various function approximators, especially deep neural networks, has gained practical success. While statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Ruiqi Zhang , Xuezhou Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Mengdi Wang

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

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic target policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with continuous action spaces. While it is common to use importance sampling for OPE, it suffers from high variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Haanvid Lee , Tri Wahyu Guntara , Jongmin Lee , Yung-Kyun Noh , Kee-Eung Kim

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Olivier Jeunen , Ben London

We introduce a novel doubly-robust (DR) off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimator for Markov decision processes, DRUnknown, designed for situations where both the logging policy and the value function are unknown. The proposed estimator…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-03 Kyungbok Lee , Myunghee Cho Paik

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in partially observable environments with complex observations, with the goal of developing estimators whose guarantee avoids exponential dependence on the horizon. While such estimators exist for MDPs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation~(OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-25 Kohsuke Kubota , Mitsuhiro Takahashi , Yuta Saito

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Josiah P. Hanna , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Yusuke Narita , Kyohei Okumura , Akihiro Shimizu , Kohei Yata

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

We study the novel problem of future off-policy evaluation (F-OPE) and learning (F-OPL) for estimating and optimizing the future value of policies in non-stationary environments, where distributions vary over time. In e-commerce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Kazuki Kawamura , Takanori Muroi , Yusuke Narita , Kei Tateno , Takuma Udagawa , Yuta Saito

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

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

This paper addresses the problem of policy selection in domains with abundant logged data, but with a restricted interaction budget. Solving this problem would enable safe evaluation and deployment of offline reinforcement learning policies…

Evaluating off-policy decisions using batch data poses significant challenges due to limited sample sizes leading to high variance. To improve Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), we must identify and address the sources of this variance. Recent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-02 Ritam Majumdar , Jack Teversham , Sonali Parbhoo