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Related papers: Pluralistic Off-policy Evaluation and Alignment

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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

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the task of estimating the expected reward of a given policy based on offline data previously collected under different policies. Therefore, OPE is a key step in applying reinforcement learning to real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Yihao Feng , Ziyang Tang , Na Zhang , Qiang Liu

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Allen Nie , Yash Chandak , Christina J. Yuan , Anirudhan Badrinath , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskil

The rapid development of large language model (LLM) alignment algorithms has resulted in a complex and fragmented landscape, with limited clarity on the effectiveness of different methods and their inter-connections. This paper introduces…

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

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

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Harvineet Singh , Shalmali Joshi , Finale Doshi-Velez , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet state-of-the-art methods still fail to learn on many training problems. On hard problems, on-policy RL rarely explores even a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yuxiao Qu , Amrith Setlur , Virginia Smith , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Aviral Kumar

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

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately evaluate the performance of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data. Although many estimators have been developed, there is no single estimator that dominates the others, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Takuma Udagawa , Haruka Kiyohara , Yusuke Narita , Yuta Saito , Kei Tateno

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

Ensuring AI models align with human values is essential for their safety and functionality. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) leverages human preferences to achieve this alignment. However, when preferences are sourced from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Ryan Bahlous-Boldi , Li Ding , Lee Spector , Scott Niekum

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Yuta Saito , Takuma Udagawa , Kei Tateno

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-10 Han Wang , Yang Xu , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

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

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…

Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-02 Yang Xu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Lan Wang , Rui Song

Offline preference optimization is a key method for enhancing and controlling the quality of Large Language Model (LLM) outputs. Typically, preference optimization is approached as an offline supervised learning task using manually-crafted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Chris Lu , Samuel Holt , Claudio Fanconi , Alex J. Chan , Jakob Foerster , Mihaela van der Schaar , Robert Tjarko Lange

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated great promise in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference. Depending on the availability of preference data, both online and offline RLHF are active areas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Shicong Cen , Jincheng Mei , Katayoon Goshvadi , Hanjun Dai , Tong Yang , Sherry Yang , Dale Schuurmans , Yuejie Chi , Bo Dai

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