Papers › Empirical Study of Off-Policy Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning

Empirical Study of Off-Policy Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning

15 Nov 2019arXiv:1911.06854archive 2025-07-28

Cameron Voloshin, Hoang M. Le, Nan Jiang, Yisong Yue

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 methods, there has been a flurry of recent proposals for OPE method, leading to a need for standardized empirical analyses. Our work takes a strong focus on diversity of experimental design to enable stress testing of OPE methods. We provide a comprehensive benchmarking suite to study the interplay of different attributes on method performance. We distill the results into a summarized set of guidelines for OPE in practice. Our software package, the Caltech OPE Benchmarking Suite (COBS), is open-sourced and we invite interested researchers to further contribute to the benchmark.

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clvoloshin/COBS officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
clvoloshin/OPE-tools officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
pearl-utexas/sope mentioned on GitHub report

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BenchmarkingDiversityExperimental DesignReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

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