Stacked calibration of off-policy policy evaluation for video game matchmaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider an industrial strength application of recommendation systems for video-game matchmaking in which off-policy policy evaluation is important but where standard approaches can hardly be applied. The objective of the policy is to sequentially form teams of players from those waiting to be matched, in such a way as to produce well-balanced matches. Unfortunately, the available training data comes from a policy that is not known perfectly and that is not stochastic, making it impossible to use methods based on importance weights. Furthermore, we observe that when the estimated reward function and the policy are obtained by training from the same off-policy dataset, the policy evaluation using the estimated reward function is biased. We present a simple calibration procedure that is similar to stacked regression and that removes most of the bias, in the experiments we performed. Data collected during beta tests of Ghost Recon Online, a first person shooter from Ubisoft, were used for the experiments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".