Context-Action Embedding Learning for Off-Policy Evaluation in Contextual Bandits

Abstract

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits with finite action space. Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) weighting is a widely used method for OPE due to its unbiased, but it suffers from significant variance when the action space is large or when some parts of the context-action space are underexplored. Recently introduced Marginalized IPS (MIPS) estimators mitigate this issue by leveraging action embeddings. However, these embeddings do not minimize the mean squared error (MSE) of the estimators and do not consider context information. To address these limitations, we introduce Context-Action Embedding Learning for MIPS, or CAEL-MIPS, which learns context-action embeddings from offline data to minimize the MSE of the MIPS estimator. Building on the theoretical analysis of bias and variance of MIPS, we present an MSE-minimizing objective for CAEL-MIPS. In the empirical studies on a synthetic dataset and a real-world dataset, we demonstrate that our estimator outperforms baselines in terms of MSE.