Minimax-Optimal Off-Policy Evaluation with Linear Function Approximation

Jul 12, 2020

Speakers

About

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history generated by unknown behavior policies. We study a regression-based fitted Q iteration method, and show that it is equivalent to a model-based method that estimates a conditional mean embedding of the transition operator. We prove that this method is information-theoretically optimal and has nearly minimal estimation error. In particular, by leveraging contraction property of Markov processes and martingale concentration, we establish a finite-sample instance-dependent error upper bound and a nearly-matching minimax lower bound. The policy evaluation error depends sharply on a restricted chi-square divergence over the function class between the long-term distribution of target policy and the distribution of past data. This restricted chi-square divergence is both instance-dependent and function-class-dependent. It characterizes the statistical limit of off-policy evaluation. Further, we provide an easily computable confidence bound for the policy evaluator, which may be useful for optimistic planning and safe policy improvement.

Organizer

Categories

About ICML 2020

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. ICML is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics. ICML is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Participants at ICML span a wide range of backgrounds, from academic and industrial researchers, to entrepreneurs and engineers, to graduate students and postdocs.

Store presentation

Should this presentation be stored for 1000 years?

How do we store presentations

Total of 0 viewers voted for saving the presentation to eternal vault which is 0.0%

Sharing

Recommended Videos

Presentations on similar topic, category or speaker

Interested in talks like this? Follow ICML 2020