arXiv:2608.16466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED) aims to collect informative data by optimizing an expected utility reflecting the goals of an exp...
By David Chen, Michael Evans, Xinwei Li, Prateek Bansal, David J. Nott
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.
By Imad Aouali
The paper investigates how reusing past samples can improve the sample efficiency of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Two variants, wPPO-U and wPPO-BH, are introduced within a multiple importance weighting framework, each reusing data from recent iterations while preserving core PPO mechanics. The authors derive theoretical policy improvement bounds for both variants and empirically evaluate their impact on continuous control tasks.
By Alessandro Montenegro, Riccardo Venturelli, Marco Mussi, Matteo Papini, Alberto Maria Metelli
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.
By Harvey Barnhard, Giacomo Opocher, Rahul Singh
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.
By Imad Aouali, Otmane Sakhi
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.
By Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, Shihan Chen