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We study the problem of batch learning from bandit feedback in the setting of extremely large action spaces. Learning from extreme bandit feedback is ubiquitous in recommendation systems, in which billions of decisions are made over sets…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-24 Romain Lopez , Inderjit S. Dhillon , Michael I. Jordan

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus , Lihong Li , Ali Mousavi

This paper develops a new framework for indirect statistical inference with guaranteed necessity and sufficiency, applicable to continuous random variables. We prove that when comparing exponentially transformed order statistics from an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-25 Z Zhang , X Hu , C Lu , T Liu

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Yusuke Narita , Kyohei Okumura , Akihiro Shimizu , Kohei Yata

We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Matteo Papini

Ordinal classification problems, where labels exhibit a natural order, are prevalent in high-stakes fields such as medicine and finance. Accurate uncertainty quantification, including the decomposition into aleatoric (inherent variability)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Stefan Haas , Eyke Hüllermeier

Developing theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity of offline RL methods is an important step towards making data-hungry RL algorithms practically viable. Currently, most results hinge on unrealistic assumptions about the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Sunil Madhow , Dan Qiao , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE), an essential component of reinforcement learning, has long suffered from stationary state distribution mismatch, undermining both stability and accuracy of OPE estimates. While existing methods correct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Fengdi Che , Bryan Chan , Chen Ma , A. Rupam Mahmood

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a fundamental task in reinforcement learning (RL). In the classic setting of linear OPE, finite-sample guarantees often take the form $$ \textrm{Evaluation error} \le \textrm{poly}(C^\pi, d,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Philip Amortila , Audrey Huang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-12 Yuta Saito , Qingyang Ren , Thorsten Joachims

This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Konstantin Hess , Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

Neural networks are often utilised in critical domain applications (e.g. self-driving cars, financial markets, and aerospace engineering), even though they exhibit overconfident predictions for ambiguous inputs. This deficiency demonstrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-03 John Mitros , Brian Mac Namee

We offer an experimental benchmark and empirical study for off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning, which is a key problem in many safety critical applications. Given the increasing interest in deploying learning-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Cameron Voloshin , Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

Propensity score (PS) methods are widely used to estimate treatment effects in non-randomized studies. Variance is typically estimated using sandwich or bootstrap methods, which can either treat the PS as estimated or fixed. The latter is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-17 Baoshan Zhang , Sean M. O'Brien , Yuan Wu , Laine E. Thomas

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of a policy from the data generated by another policy(ies). In particular, we focus on the doubly robust (DR)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Mehrdad Farajtabar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Many engineering tasks require solving families of nonlinear constrained optimization problems, parametrized in setting-specific variables. This is computationally demanding, particularly, if solutions have to be computed across strongly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-24 Matthias K. Hoffmann , Amine Othmane , Kathrin Flaßkamp

Sequential Recommendation (SR) predicts users next interactions by modeling the temporal order of their historical behaviors. Existing approaches, including traditional sequential models and generative recommenders, achieve strong…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Sirui Huang , Jing Long , Qian Li , Guandong Xu , Qing Li

Label noise in data has long been an important problem in supervised learning applications as it affects the effectiveness of many widely used classification methods. Recently, important real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-02 Shunan Yao , Bradley Rava , Xin Tong , Gareth James

Graph Out-of-Distribution (OOD), requiring that models trained on biased data generalize to the unseen test data, has considerable real-world applications. One of the most mainstream methods is to extract the invariant subgraph by aligning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Xuexin Chen , Ruichu Cai , Kaitao Zheng , Zhifan Jiang , Zhengting Huang , Zhifeng Hao , Zijian Li