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Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-14 Tatsuki Takahashi , Chihiro Maru , Hiroko Shoji

This paper demonstrates the successful application of Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) to accelerate recommender system development and optimization at Adyen, a global leader in financial payment processing. Facing the limitations of traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Alex Egg

The online advertising market, with its thousands of auctions run per second, presents a daunting challenge for advertisers who wish to optimize their spend under a budget constraint. Thus, advertising platforms typically provide automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Dmytro Korenkevych , Frank Cheng , Artsiom Balakir , Alex Nikulkov , Lingnan Gao , Zhihao Cen , Zuobing Xu , Zheqing Zhu

The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

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

Inspired by online ad allocation, we study online stochastic packing linear programs from theoretical and practical standpoints. We first present a near-optimal online algorithm for a general class of packing linear programs which model…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-02-17 Jon Feldman , Monika Henzinger , Nitish Korula , Vahab S. Mirrokni , Cliff Stein

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

Off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) use offline observational data to make better decisions, which is crucial in applications where online experimentation is limited. However, depending entirely on logged data, OPE/L is sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Kaiwen Wang , Zhengyuan Zhou

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

In this work, we investigate the online learning problem of revenue maximization in ad auctions, where the seller needs to learn the click-through rates (CTRs) of each ad candidate and charge the price of the winner through a pay-per-click…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Zhe Feng , Christopher Liaw , Zixin Zhou

Online Budgeted Matching (OBM) is a classic problem with important applications in online advertising, online service matching, revenue management, and beyond. Traditional online algorithms typically assume a small bid setting, where the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Jianyi Yang , Pengfei Li , Adam Wierman , Shaolei Ren

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

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

First-price auctions have recently gained significant traction in digital advertising markets, exemplified by Google's transition from second-price to first-price auctions. Unlike in second-price auctions, where bidding one's private…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zihao Hu , Xiaoyu Fan , Yuan Yao , Jiheng Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Ranking interfaces are everywhere in online platforms. There is thus an ever growing interest in their Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), aiming towards an accurate performance evaluation of ranking policies using logged data. A de-facto approach…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-28 Haruka Kiyohara , Masatoshi Uehara , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto , Yuta Saito

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aishwarya Mandyam , Shengpu Tang , Jiayu Yao , Jenna Wiens , Barbara E. Engelhardt

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy using historical data collected under a different logging policy. OPE methods typically assume overlap between the target and logging policy, enabling…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-12 Samir Khan , Martin Saveski , Johan Ugander

Automated bidding to optimize online advertising with various constraints, e.g. ROI constraints and budget constraints, is widely adopted by advertisers. A key challenge lies in designing algorithms for non-truthful mechanisms with ROI…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yuan Deng , Yilin Li , Wei Tang , Hanrui Zhang

Before A/B testing online a new version of a recommender system, it is usual to perform some offline evaluations on historical data. We focus on evaluation methods that compute an estimator of the potential uplift in revenue that could…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Alexandre Gilotte , Clément Calauzènes , Thomas Nedelec , Alexandre Abraham , Simon Dollé