44 citations · 149 across the 16 of their papers we have counts for
16 papers
TourMart: A Parametric Audit Instrument for Commission Steering in LLM Travel Agents
Yao Liu
Online travel agents (Booking, Trip.com, Expedia) have replaced ranked-list interfaces with conversational LLM agents that compress many options into one sentence of advice. Each b…
Contracting with a Mechanism Designer
Tian Bai, Yiding Feng, Yaohao Liu +2
This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of cro…
Budgeting Counterfactual for Offline RL
Yao Liu, Pratik Chaudhari, Rasool Fakoor
The main challenge of offline reinforcement learning, where data is limited, arises from a sequence of counterfactual reasoning dilemmas within the realm of potential actions: What…
TD Convergence: An Optimization Perspective
Kavosh Asadi, Shoham Sabach, Yao Liu +2
We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that T…
Reinforcement Learning Tutor Better Supported Lower Performers in a Math Task
Sherry Ruan, Allen Nie, William Steenbergen +9
Resource limitations make it hard to provide all students with one of the most effective educational interventions: personalized instruction. Reinforcement learning could be a key…
Offline Policy Optimization with Eligible Actions
Yao Liu, Yannis Flet-Berliac, Emma Brunskill
Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling an…
Provably Sample-Efficient RL with Side Information about Latent Dynamics
Yao Liu, Dipendra Misra, Miro Dudík +1
We study reinforcement learning (RL) in settings where observations are high-dimensional, but where an RL agent has access to abstract knowledge about the structure of the state sp…
Provably Good Batch Reinforcement Learning Without Great Exploration
Yao Liu, Adith Swaminathan, Alekh Agarwal +1
Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is chall…
Interpretable Off-Policy Evaluation in Reinforcement Learning by Highlighting Influential Transitions
Omer Gottesman, Joseph Futoma, Yao Liu +4
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deplo…
All-Action Policy Gradient Methods: A Numerical Integration Approach
Benjamin Petit, Loren Amdahl-Culleton, Yao Liu +2
While often stated as an instance of the likelihood ratio trick [Rubinstein, 1989], the original policy gradient theorem [Sutton, 1999] involves an integral over the action space.…
Understanding the Curse of Horizon in Off-Policy Evaluation via Conditional Importance Sampling
Yao Liu, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Emma Brunskill
Off-policy policy estimators that use importance sampling (IS) can suffer from high variance in long-horizon domains, and there has been particular excitement over new IS methods t…
Combining Parametric and Nonparametric Models for Off-Policy Evaluation
Omer Gottesman, Yao Liu, Scott Sussex +2
We consider a model-based approach to perform batch off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Our method takes a mixture-of-experts approach to combine parametric and non-pa…
Off-Policy Policy Gradient with State Distribution Correction
Yao Liu, Adith Swaminathan, Alekh Agarwal +1
We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approac…
Behaviour Policy Estimation in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation: Calibration Matters
Aniruddh Raghu, Omer Gottesman, Yao Liu +4
In this work, we consider the problem of estimating a behaviour policy for use in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation (OPE) when the true behaviour policy is unknown. Via a series of empi…
When Simple Exploration is Sample Efficient: Identifying Sufficient Conditions for Random Exploration to Yield PAC RL Algorithms
Yao Liu, Emma Brunskill
Efficient exploration is one of the key challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most traditional sample efficiency bounds require strategic exploration. Recently man…
Representation Balancing MDPs for Off-Policy Policy Evaluation
Yao Liu, Omer Gottesman, Aniruddh Raghu +4
We study the problem of off-policy policy evaluation (OPPE) in RL. In contrast to prior work, we consider how to estimate both the individual policy value and average policy value…