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Counterfactual reasoning and learning systems: the example of computational advertising

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TLDR
This work shows how to leverage causal inference to understand the behavior of complex learning systems interacting with their environment and predict the consequences of changes to the system and allow both humans and algorithms to select the changes that would have improved the system performance.
Abstract
This work shows how to leverage causal inference to understand the behavior of complex learning systems interacting with their environment and predict the consequences of changes to the system. Such predictions allow both humans and algorithms to select the changes that would have improved the system performance. This work is illustrated by experiments on the ad placement system associated with the Bing search engine.

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Proceedings Article

Deep Learning with Logged Bandit Feedback

TL;DR: A Counterfactual Risk Minimization (CRM) approach for training deep networks using an equivariant empirical risk estimator with variance regularization, BanditNet, is proposed and it is shown how the resulting objective can be decomposed in a way that allows Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) training.
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Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generation

TL;DR: This paper proposes Counterfactual Story Rewriting: given an original story and an intervening counterfactual event, the task is to minimally revise the story to make it compatible with the given counterfactually event.
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Horizon: Facebook’s Open Source Applied Reinforcement Learning Platform

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{Toward Minimax Off-policy Value Estimation}

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Breaking the Curse of Horizon: Infinite-Horizon Off-Policy Estimation

TL;DR: A new off-policy estimation method that applies importance sampling directly on the stationary state-visitation distributions to avoid the exploding variance issue faced by existing estimators is proposed.
References
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Book

Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

TL;DR: This book provides a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning, which ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications.
MonographDOI

Causality: models, reasoning, and inference

TL;DR: The art and science of cause and effect have been studied in the social sciences for a long time as mentioned in this paper, see, e.g., the theory of inferred causation, causal diagrams and the identification of causal effects.
Journal ArticleDOI

Simple Statistical Gradient-Following Algorithms for Connectionist Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: This article presents a general class of associative reinforcement learning algorithms for connectionist networks containing stochastic units that are shown to make weight adjustments in a direction that lies along the gradient of expected reinforcement in both immediate-reinforcement tasks and certain limited forms of delayed-reInforcement tasks, and they do this without explicitly computing gradient estimates.
Book

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning.