On Trajectory Augmentations for Off-Policy Evaluation

In the realm of reinforcement learning (RL), off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds a pivotal position, especially in high-stake human-centric scenarios such as elearning and healthcare. Applying OPE to these domains is often challenging with scarce and underrepresentative offline training trajectories. Data augmentation has been a successful technique to enrich training data. However, directly employing existing data augmentation methods to OPE may not be feasible, due to the Markovian nature within the offline trajectories and the desire for generalizability across diverse target policies. In this work, we propose an offline trajectory augmentation approach, named OAT, to specifically facilitate OPE in human-involved scenarios. We propose sub-trajectory mining to extract potentially valuable sub-trajectories from offline data, and diversify the behaviors within those sub-trajectories by varying coverage of the state-action space. Our work was empirically evaluated in a wide array of environments, encompassing both simulated scenarios and realworld domains like robotic control, healthcare, and e-learning, where the training trajectories include varying levels of coverage of the state-action space. By enhancing the performance of a variety of OPE methods, our work offers a promising path forward for tackling OPE challenges in situations where human-centric data may be limited or underrepresentative.