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arXiv · 2201.09798

IMO$^3$: Interactive Multi-Objective Off-Policy Optimization

Nan Wang·Hongning Wang·Maryam Karimzadehgan·Branislav Kveton·Craig Boutilier
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Abstract

Most real-world optimization problems have multiple objectives. A system designer needs to find a policy that trades off these objectives to reach a desired operating point. This problem has been studied extensively in the setting of known objective functions. We consider a more practical but challenging setting of unknown objective functions. In industry, this problem is mostly approached with online A/B testing, which is often costly and inefficient. As an alternative, we propose interactive multi-objective off-policy optimization (IMO$^3$). The key idea in our approach is to interact with a system designer using policies evaluated in an off-policy fashion to uncover which policy maximizes her unknown utility function. We theoretically show that IMO$^3$ identifies a near-optimal policy with high probability, depending on the amount of feedback from the designer and training data for off-policy estimation. We demonstrate its effectiveness empirically on multiple multi-objective optimization problems.

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Nan Wang, Hongning Wang, Maryam Karimzadehgan, Branislav Kveton, Craig Boutilier. 2022-01-24. IMO$^3$: Interactive Multi-Objective Off-Policy Optimization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09798

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