English
Related papers

Related papers: Additive Control Variates Dominate Self-Normalisat…

200 papers

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

The deployment of safe and trustworthy machine learning systems, and particularly complex black box neural networks, in real-world applications requires reliable and certified guarantees on their performance. The conformal prediction…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Paul Melki , Lionel Bombrun , Boubacar Diallo , Jérôme Dias , Jean-Pierre da Costa

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Masahiro Kato , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Shota Yasui

Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation~(OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-25 Kohsuke Kubota , Mitsuhiro Takahashi , Yuta Saito

Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Olivier Jeunen

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

This paper focuses on the Bayesian Network Propensity Score (BNPS), a novel approach for estimating treatment effects in observational studies characterized by unknown (and likely unbalanced) designs and complex dependency structures among…

There are many models, often called unnormalized models, whose normalizing constants are not calculated in closed form. Maximum likelihood estimation is not directly applicable to unnormalized models. Score matching, contrastive divergence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Takeru Matsuda , Fumiyasu Komaki

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-28 Xiaohong Chen , Zhengling Qi

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

Recent advances in end-to-end autonomous driving show that policies trained on patch-aligned features extracted from foundation models generalize better to Out-of-Distribution (OOD). We hypothesize that due to the self-attention mechanism,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Amir Mallak , Erfan Aasi , Shiva Sreeram , Tsun-Hsuan Wang , Daniela Rus , Alaa Maalouf

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

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

Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Omer Gottesman , Joseph Futoma , Yao Liu , Sonali Parbhoo , Leo Anthony Celi , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

This study addresses the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) from dependent samples obtained via the bandit algorithm. The goal of OPE is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained from behavior policies generated by the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Masahiro Kato

The propensity score (PS) is often used to control for large numbers of covariates in high-dimensional healthcare database studies. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) has become the most widely used tool for fitting…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-17 Richard Wyss , Ben B. Hansen , Georg Hahn , Lars van der Laan , Kueiyu Joshua Lin

This paper considers an anomaly detection problem in which a detection algorithm assigns anomaly scores to multi-dimensional data points, such as cellular networks' Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We propose an optimization framework to…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-01 Ali Maatouk , Fadhel Ayed , Wenjie Li , Yu Wang , Hong Zhu , Jiantao Ye

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods aim to estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aishwarya Mandyam , Jason Meng , Ge Gao , Jiankai Sun , Mac Schwager , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emma Brunskill

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the benefit of following a counterfactual sequence of actions, given data collected from executed sequences. However, existing OPE estimators often exhibit high bias and high variance in problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Aaman Rebello , Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens , Sonali Parbhoo