Benchmarks for Deep Off-Policy Evaluation
This addresses a critical gap for researchers in reinforcement learning and decision-making domains like healthcare and robotics, where offline evaluation is essential but incremental as it provides tools rather than new methods.
The paper tackles the lack of standardized benchmarks for off-policy evaluation (OPE) by introducing a collection of policies and datasets for high-dimensional continuous control problems, enabling evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms to measure progress in this field.
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many real-world domains, such as in healthcare, recommender systems, or robotics, where online data collection is an expensive and potentially dangerous process. Being able to accurately evaluate and select high-performing policies without requiring online interaction could yield significant benefits in safety, time, and cost for these applications. While many OPE methods have been proposed in recent years, comparing results between papers is difficult because currently there is a lack of a comprehensive and unified benchmark, and measuring algorithmic progress has been challenging due to the lack of difficult evaluation tasks. In order to address this gap, we present a collection of policies that in conjunction with existing offline datasets can be used for benchmarking off-policy evaluation. Our tasks include a range of challenging high-dimensional continuous control problems, with wide selections of datasets and policies for performing policy selection. The goal of our benchmark is to provide a standardized measure of progress that is motivated from a set of principles designed to challenge and test the limits of existing OPE methods. We perform an evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms and provide open-source access to our data and code to foster future research in this area.