{Toward Minimax Off-policy Value Estimation}
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper studies the off-policy evaluation prob-lem, where one aims to estimate the value of a target policy based on a sample of observations collected by another policy. We first consider the single-state, or multi-armed bandit case, estab-lish a finite-time minimax risk lower bound, and analyze the risk of three standard estimators. For the so-called regression estimator, we show that while it is asymptotically optimal, for small sam-ple sizes it may perform suboptimally compared to an ideal oracle up to a multiplicative factor that depends on the number of actions. We also show that the other two popular estimators can be ar-bitrarily worse than the optimal, even in the limit of infinitely many data points. The performance of the estimators are studied in synthetic and real problems; illustrating the methods strengths and weaknesses. We also discuss the implications of these results for off-policy evaluation problems in contextual bandits and fixed-horizon Markov decision processes. 1
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it