The paper investigates how policy learning algorithms should balance expected welfare against sampling risk in evidence-based policymaking. It demonstrates that algorithmic stability—specifically, a policy’s insensitivity to the replacement of a single experimental unit—limits sampling risk. The authors introduce policy‑vote bagging, which trains on many subsamples and averages their votes, preserving expected welfare while improving expected utility for risk‑averse researchers, and provide sharp bounds linking estimation accuracy, subsample size, and welfare variation, including an exact guarantee under CARA utility.
arXiv:2607. 03385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Policy learning has received substantial attention with the goal of learning policies from observational data for decision-making.
arXiv:2606. 00913v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-arm bandit algorithms are increasingly used in online platforms, clinical trials, and social science experiments, but valid statistical inference on their performance remains an open challenge.
arXiv:2607. 08335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Policy-based approaches to Bayesian experimental design (BED) allow the learning of deep policy networks that adaptively make intelligent design decisions based on previously collected data.
arXiv:2602. 17894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data collection is a critical component of modern statistical and machine learning pipelines, particularly when data must be gathered from multiple heterogeneous sources to study a target population of interest.
The paper explores how data from fixed A/B tests can guide the deployment of adaptive experiments using contextual bandits. By combining off‑policy evaluation with a controlled warm‑start simulation, the authors rank pre‑specified adaptive and non‑adaptive policies using doubly robust estimators. Experiments on synthetic trials and real benchmarks show that adaptive, context‑aware policies outperform fixed allocations when heterogeneity exists, but offer little advantage otherwise.
arXiv:2509. 03456v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits.
arXiv:2607. 28916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multistep credit assignment is critical for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, yet managing off-policy bias in Q-learning remains a fundamental challenge.
arXiv:2406.03894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due...
arXiv:2609.13730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable progress in offline policy learning depends on careful reporting, well-tuned baselines, and evaluation across diverse conditions. Prior work h...
arXiv:2605. 00762v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study meritocratic fairness in budgeted combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback, where a learner selects at most $K$ arms per time step and observes only the noisy aggregate reward of the selected set.
arXiv:2607. 28408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis studies policy learning in interactive systems where an agent observes a context, selects an action from a very large set, and receives partial feedback.
MInTRL (Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning) expands exploration in on-policy reinforcement learning by inserting sparse, local corrections into rollouts via a judge-intervention policy. These interventions replace erroneous suffixes and immediately return control to the main policy, allowing the agent to explore beyond its natural trajectory while maintaining on-policy data. The method uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective, avoiding importance sampling, and demonstrates superior performance on math and code benchmarks compared to standard on-policy and off-policy baselines.