{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/long-term-off-policy-evaluation-and-learning","title":"Long-term Off-Policy Evaluation and Learning","arxiv_id":"2404.15691","date":"2024-04-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yuta Saito","Himan Abdollahpouri","Jesse Anderton","Ben Carterette","Mounia Lalmas"],"abstract":"Short- and long-term outcomes of an algorithm often differ, with damaging downstream effects. A known example is a click-bait algorithm, which may increase short-term clicks but damage long-term user engagement. A possible solution to estimate the long-term outcome is to run an online experiment or A/B test for the potential algorithms, but it takes months or even longer to observe the long-term outcomes of interest, making the algorithm selection process unacceptably slow. This work thus studies the problem of feasibly yet accurately estimating the long-term outcome of an algorithm using only historical and short-term experiment data. Existing approaches to this problem either need a restrictive assumption about the short-term outcomes called surrogacy or cannot effectively use short-term outcomes, which is inefficient. Therefore, we propose a new framework called Long-term Off-Policy Evaluation (LOPE), which is based on reward function decomposition. LOPE works under a more relaxed assumption than surrogacy and effectively leverages short-term rewards to substantially reduce the variance. Synthetic experiments show that LOPE outperforms existing approaches particularly when surrogacy is severely violated and the long-term reward is noisy. In addition, real-world experiments on large-scale A/B test data collected on a music streaming platform show that LOPE can estimate the long-term outcome of actual algorithms more accurately than existing feasible methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15691v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.15691v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"long-term-off-policy-evaluation-and-learning","repo_url":"https://github.com/usaito/www2024-lope","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"off-policy-evaluation","task_name":"Off-policy evaluation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.15691","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}