The paper proposes a method for allocating a limited budget of expert annotations to optimize the accuracy of off-policy evaluation in settings where rewards are missing or noisy. By deriving variance‑optimal annotation probabilities for sequential, forward‑monotone protocols, the authors provide a batch‑adaptive implementation that can be applied to real data. Experiments on casenotes from a homelessness services nonprofit and on human‑preference votes from LMArena demonstrate substantial reductions in RMSE—up to 65% for housing placement and 68% for progress toward a housing application—when using only 40% or more of the full annotation budget.
By Woojin Chae, Ezinne Nwankwo, Haitong Qin, Angela Zhou
Offline reinforcement learning and off-policy evaluation evaluates dynamic treatment rules based on retrospectively collected data prior to deployment. In recent AI applications, state and reward info...
arXiv:2604. 14575v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Marketing research often relies on parameters estimated from costly human-generated data, such as conjoint survey responses, purchase decisions, and field experiment outcomes.
By Cheng Lu, Mengxin Wang, Dennis J. Zhang, Heng Zhang
arXiv:2508. 13187v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Homelessness is a persistent social challenge, impacting millions worldwide.
By Jonathan A. Karr Jr., Benjamin F. Herbst, Matthew L. Sisk, Xueyun Li, Ting Hua, Matthew Hauenstein, Georgina Curto, Nitesh V. Chawla
arXiv:2606. 17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost.
By Joel Persson, M{\aa}rten Schultzberg, Sebastian Ankargren
arXiv:2609.06294v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) enables efficient targeting of interventions, but many applications have limited experimental s...
By Maitreyi Swaroop, Shikha Bhat, Samantha Rodriguez, Tamar Krishnamurti, Bryan Wilder