Related papers: Breaking Determinism: Stochastic Modeling for Reli…

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents have showcased strong results across many domains, a major concern is their inherent opaqueness and the safety of such systems in real-world use cases. To overcome these issues, we need agents…

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…

The quantification of uncertainty is important for the adoption of machine learning, especially to reject out-of-distribution (OOD) data back to human experts for review. Yet progress has been slow, as a balance must be struck between…

With the advancement of machine learning, an increasing number of studies are employing automated mechanism design (AMD) methods for optimal auction design. However, all previous AMD architectures designed to generate optimal mechanisms…

The rise of automated bidding strategies in online advertising presents new challenges in designing and analyzing efficient auction mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on proportional mechanisms within the context of auto-bidding and study…

Combinatorial auctions (CA) are a well-studied area in algorithmic mechanism design. However, contrary to the standard model, empirical studies suggest that a bidder's valuation often does not depend solely on the goods assigned to him. For…

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…

In offline-to-online reinforcement learning (O2O-RL), policies are first safely trained offline using previously collected datasets and then further fine-tuned for tasks via limited online interactions. In a typical O2O-RL pipeline,…

The competitive auction was first proposed by Goldberg, Hartline, and Wright. In their paper, they introduce the competitive analysis framework of online algorithm designing into the traditional revenue-maximizing auction design problem.…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is crucial for assessing a target policy's impact offline before its deployment. However, achieving accurate OPE in large state spaces remains challenging. This paper studies state abstractions -- originally…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to learn treatment policies and aid decision making in healthcare. However, given the need for generalization over complex state/action spaces, the incorporation of function approximators (e.g., deep…

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

Causally identifying the effect of digital advertising is challenging, because experimentation is expensive, and observational data lacks random variation. This paper identifies a pervasive source of naturally occurring, quasi-experimental…

This paper develops learning-augmented algorithms for energy trading in volatile electricity markets. The basic problem is to sell (or buy) $k$ units of energy for the highest revenue (lowest cost) over uncertain time-varying prices, which…

In this paper, we study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to bid adaptively in repeated first-price auctions to maximize cumulative payoff. This problem arises from the recent industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to…

Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…

Recently, there has been gradually more attention paid to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) performance prediction, whose goal is to predict the performance of trained models on unlabeled OOD test datasets, so that we could better leverage and…

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…

Online controlled experiments (A/B tests) are fundamental to data-driven decision-making in the digital economy. However, their real-world application is frequently compromised by two critical shortcomings: the use of statistically flawed…