论文

CAT-CCB:面向未测混杂的离线强化学习迁移框架

Transportable Offline Reinforcement Learning in Presence of Unmeasured Confounding

精选理由

离线 RL 遇上混杂变量和域差异怎么办?这篇用工具变量加负控制给出可识别方案,做因果 RL 的可以看看推导。

一篇 arXiv 论文研究离线强化学习在领域差异与未测混杂双重挑战下的策略学习,方法名为 CAT-CCB。框架结合迁移性理论与工具变量、负控制、代理变量来识别目标域因果量。在混杂上下文赌臂场景中,识别归结为桥函数积分方程组,可通过有限样本的极小极大估计求解,并用置信集做悲观策略优化。论文还将方法扩展到情景式混杂 MDP,得到 CAT-CMDP,并给出有限样本次优性保证,线性类别下上下文赌臂达到 O~(N^{-1/2}) 速率。

原文 · arXiv cs.LG

Transportable Offline Reinforcement Learning in Presence of Unmeasured Confounding

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to learn decision policies from previously collected data, but deployment environments may differ from the domains in which the data were collected, and logged variables may omit confounders that affected both historical actions and outcomes. We study offline policy learning under the joint challenges of domain discrepancy and unmeasured confounding, where multiple heterogeneous source datasets provide complementary information about a target domain. We develop a causally adjusted transportability framework combining transportability theory with instrumental variables, negative controls, and proxies to identify target-domain causal quantities. For confounded contextual bandits, identification reduces to systems of bridge-function integral equations, enabling minimax estimation from finite samples. Confidence sets for the identified quantities are then used for pessimistic policy optimization, yielding CAT-CCB. We extend the framework to episodic confounded Markov decision processes, where complementary sources identify target reward and transition mechanisms under structural and completeness conditions. Under Gaussian dynamics and linear function approximation, this yields CAT-CMDP. We establish high-probability finite-sample suboptimality guarantees that quantify the effects of approximation, estimation, source-to-target shift, offline coverage, and sample size. For bounded finite-dimensional linear classes, the contextual-bandit guarantee recovers the standard $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(N^{-1/2})$ rate. Numerical experiments support the effectiveness of the framework for learning target-domain policies from heterogeneous confounded data. Together, the results provide a principled approach when no single source dataset suffices for causal identification and policy optimization.