Related papers: Policy Learning with Abstention
Ranking systems influence decision-making in high-stakes domains like health, education, and employment, where they can have substantial economic and social impacts. This makes the integration of safety mechanisms essential. One such…
Firms increasingly delegate decisions to learning algorithms in platform markets. Standard algorithms perform well when platform policies are stationary, but firms often face ambiguity about whether policies are stationary or adapt…
In high-stakes AI applications, even a single action can cause irreparable damage. However, nearly all of sequential decision-making theory assumes that all errors are recoverable (e.g., by bounding rewards). Standard bandit algorithms that…
Policy learning can be used to extract individualized treatment regimes from observational data in healthcare, civics, e-commerce, and beyond. One big hurdle to policy learning is a commonplace lack of overlap in the data for different…
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems play an increasingly prominent role in human decision-making, challenges surface in the realm of human-AI interactions. One challenge arises from the suboptimal AI policies due to the inadequate…
The goal of active learning is to achieve the same accuracy achievable by passive learning, while using much fewer labels. Exponential savings in terms of label complexity have been proved in very special cases, but fundamental lower bounds…
Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…
We study the key framework of learning with abstention in the multi-class classification setting. In this setting, the learner can choose to abstain from making a prediction with some pre-defined cost. We present a series of new theoretical…
In the setting of sequential prediction of individual $\{0, 1\}$-sequences with expert advice, we show that by allowing the learner to abstain from the prediction by paying a cost marginally smaller than $\frac 12$ (say, $0.49$), it is…
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…
We construct and analyze active learning algorithms for the problem of binary classification with abstention. We consider three abstention settings: \emph{fixed-cost} and two variants of \emph{bounded-rate} abstention, and for each of them…
A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…
We study the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational data while accounting for possible unobserved confounding. Previous approaches, which assume unconfoundedness, i.e., that no unobserved confounders affect…
We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…
Rewards and punishments in different forms are pervasive and present in a wide variety of decision-making scenarios. By observing the outcome of a sufficient number of repeated trials, one would gradually learn the value and usefulness of a…
In some reinforcement learning problems an agent may be provided with a set of input policies, perhaps learned from prior experience or provided by advisors. We present a reinforcement learning with policy advice (RLPA) algorithm which…
In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…
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…
Many applied decision-making problems have a dynamic component: The policymaker needs not only to choose whom to treat, but also when to start which treatment. For example, a medical doctor may choose between postponing treatment (watchful…