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Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Personalised interactive systems such as recommender systems require selecting relevant items from massive catalogs dependent on context. Reward-driven offline optimisation of these systems can be achieved by a relaxation of the discrete…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Otmane Sakhi , David Rohde , Alexandre Gilotte

The application of supervised learning techniques in combination with model predictive control (MPC) has recently generated significant interest, particularly in the area of approximate explicit MPC, where function approximators like deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Christopher A. Orrico , Bokan Yang , Dinesh Krishnamoorthy

This paper investigates online power control for point-to-point energy harvesting communications over wireless fading channels. A linear-policy-based approximation is derived for the relative-value function in the Bellman equation of the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hao Wu , Shengtian Yang , Huiguo Gao , Diao Wang , Jun Chen , Guanding Yu

We consider estimation of a linear functional of the treatment effect using adaptively collected data. This task finds a variety of applications including the off-policy evaluation (\textsf{OPE}) in contextual bandits, and estimation of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-21 Jeonghwan Lee , Cong Ma

Importance sampling (IS) is a common reweighting strategy for off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. While it is consistent and unbiased, it can result in high variance updates to the weights for the value function. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Matthew Schlegel , Wesley Chung , Daniel Graves , Jian Qian , Martha White

We study quantile-optimal policy learning where the goal is to find a policy whose reward distribution has the largest $\alpha$-quantile for some $\alpha \in (0, 1)$. We focus on the offline setting whose generating process involves…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-10 Zhongren Chen , Siyu Chen , Zhengling Qi , Xiaohong Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Tengyang Xie , Yifei Ma , Yu-Xiang Wang

Policy optimization methods are powerful algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their flexibility to deal with policy parameterization and ability to handle model misspecification. However, these methods usually suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Yunfan Li , Yiran Wang , Yu Cheng , Lin Yang

Infinite horizon off-policy policy evaluation is a highly challenging task due to the excessively large variance of typical importance sampling (IS) estimators. Recently, Liu et al. (2018a) proposed an approach that significantly reduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-17 Ziyang Tang , Yihao Feng , Lihong Li , Dengyong Zhou , Qiang Liu

Offline reinforcement learning methods hold the promise of learning policies from pre-collected datasets without the need to query the environment for new transitions. This setting is particularly well-suited for continuous control robotic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Xi Chen , Ali Ghadirzadeh , Tianhe Yu , Yuan Gao , Jianhao Wang , Wenzhe Li , Bin Liang , Chelsea Finn , Chongjie Zhang

We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Nan Jiang

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

In some applications of reinforcement learning, a dataset of pre-collected experience is already available but it is also possible to acquire some additional online data to help improve the quality of the policy. However, it may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Ruiqi Zhang , Andrea Zanette

This paper develops a robust and efficient method for policy learning from observational data in the presence of unobserved confounding, complementing existing instrumental variable (IV) based approaches. We employ the marginal sensitivity…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-29 Zequn Jin , Gaoqian Xu , Xi Zheng , Yahong Zhou

Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Ehsan Imani , Eric Graves , Martha White

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

The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Jared Markowitz , Jesse Silverberg , Gary Collins

Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Chinmaya Kausik , Yangyi Lu , Kevin Tan , Maggie Makar , Yixin Wang , Ambuj Tewari