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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

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

In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alex Irpan , Kanishka Rao , Konstantinos Bousmalis , Chris Harris , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the performance of hypothetical policies using data generated by a different policy. Because of its huge potential impact in practice, there has been growing research interest in this field.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Yuta Saito , Shunsuke Aihara , Megumi Matsutani , Yusuke Narita

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Chengchun Shi , Masatoshi Uehara , Jiawei Huang , Nan Jiang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in ranking settings with large ranking action spaces, which stems from an increase in both the number of unique actions and length of the ranking, is essential for assessing new recommender policies using only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Tatsuki Takahashi , Chihiro Maru , Hiroko Shoji

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

Importance sampling-based estimators for off-policy evaluation (OPE) are valued for their simplicity, unbiasedness, and reliance on relatively few assumptions. However, the variance of these estimators is often high, especially when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Simon P. Shen , Yecheng Jason Ma , Omer Gottesman , Finale Doshi-Velez

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most vibrant research frontiers in machine learning and has been recently applied to solve a number of challenging problems. In this paper, we primarily focus on off-policy evaluation (OPE), one of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-14 Masatoshi Uehara , Chengchun Shi , Nathan Kallus

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the problem of slate contextual bandits where a policy selects multi-dimensional actions known as slates. This problem is widespread in recommender systems, search engines, marketing, to medical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Haruka Kiyohara , Masahiro Nomura , Yuta Saito

Classical semiparametric inference with missing outcome data is not robust to contamination of the observed data and a single observation can have arbitrarily large influence on estimation of a parameter of interest. This sensitivity is…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-02 Eva Cantoni , Xavier de Luna

This study addresses the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) from dependent samples obtained via the bandit algorithm. The goal of OPE is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained from behavior policies generated by the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Masahiro Kato

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

Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Kristopher De Asis , Eric Graves , Richard S. Sutton

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables but the behavior policy depends on latent states (Tennenholtz et al. (2020a)). Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Yash Nair , Nan Jiang

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

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) from multiple logging policies, each generating a dataset of fixed size, i.e., stratified sampling. Previous work noted that in this setting the ordering of the variances of different importance sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nathan Kallus , Yuta Saito , Masatoshi Uehara

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods allow us to compute the expected reward of a policy by using the logged data collected by a different policy. OPE is a viable alternative to running expensive online A/B tests: it can speed up the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Jacek Golebiowski , Philipp Schmidt , Ziawasch Abedjan , Artur Bekasov

We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-03 Sofia Ek , Dave Zachariah , Fredrik D. Johansson , Petre Stoica

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a contextual bandit policy prior to deployment. As such, OPE plays a critical role in ensuring safety in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. However, standard OPE approaches are limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Aishwarya Mandyam , Kalyani Limaye , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emily Alsentzer