Policy Evaluation

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Overview

Policy evaluation asks how well a decision rule performs and whether it improves on alternatives in settings such as reinforcement learning, marketplaces, healthcare, and public policy. Common approaches include temporal-difference and off-policy value estimation, propensity-score and inverse-probability methods, randomized or adaptive experiments, and simulation with agent-based models or digital twins. Researchers also develop confidence intervals, risk-sensitive measures, and benchmarks to compare policies when observations are limited or outcomes are uncertain. A central challenge is that offline estimates and benchmark rankings can mislead under confounding, distribution shift, or adaptive behavior, so reliable assessment must connect metrics to deployment goals and often requires prospective validation.

Latest papers

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55 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 120% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. A Contextual Measure of Ambiguity in Prescriptive Text

    Oct 26, 2026Sally Dong, Luke Thorburn, Andrew Konya +1Annotator DisagreementPolicy Evaluation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology · AI & Democracy Foundation

  2. Near Minimax Rate for Quantile Distributional Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 21, 2026Zijie Cheng, Zhihua ZhangDistributional RLPolicy Evaluation

    School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University

  3. Policy Central: Detecting Conflicts, Redundancy, and Similarity in Deployed Police Policy

    Oct 21, 2026Holly Baker, Michael Kuo, Kyana PollasPolicy EvaluationSemantic Textual Similarity

    PolicingLab, Miami, Florida, United States

  4. Better Policies, Worse Verifier Audits

    Oct 21, 2026Daniel Cieślak, Jacek ŁubińskiAlgorithmic AuditingPolicy Evaluation

    Gdańsk University of Technology, Gdańsk, Poland

  5. When Does an Added Planning Capability Create Operational Value? An Observable Evidence Standard

    Oct 19, 2026Yihua Xu, Yan Lyu, Jize Li +4Policy EvaluationModel-Based Planning

    Independent Researcher, San Jose, California, USA · Independent Researchers, Boston, Massachusetts, USA · Independent Researcher, Seattle, Washington, USA +2

  6. Conformal Policy Selection: When to Deploy AI Decisions for Targeted Intervention

    Oct 16, 2026Junyu Cao, Ruijiang Gao, Maytal Saar-Tsechansky +1Policy EvaluationFDR Control

    McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 · Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080 · Warrington College of Business, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611

  7. Explore Once, Evaluate Many: Multiple Policy Evaluation for Stochastic Linear Bandits

    Oct 15, 2026Spyros Dragazis, Yilei Chen, Aldo PacchianoPolicy EvaluationLinear Contextual Bandits

    Boston University · Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

  8. Provable Transformer Context Compression for In-Context Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 14, 2026Yajie Zhao, Yingjun Mo, Zhiyong Wang +3In-Context RLIn-Context Learning

    Southern University of Science and Technology · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Harbin Institute of Technology

  9. Inference on the Value of Policy Improvement in Adaptive Experiments

    Oct 11, 2026Justin Whitehouse, Emma Brunskill, Vasilis SyrgkanisPolicy EvaluationSemiparametric Inference

    Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University · Computer Science, Stanford University

  10. Holdout Best-of-N: Unbiased Evaluation and Its Cost

    Oct 6, 2026Shrey Shah, Yinheng LiBest-of-N SamplingPolicy Evaluation

  11. Agent Policy-Value Audit: Separating Transition Composition from Event Selection in Financial LLM Agents

    Oct 2, 2026Mingyang, Chen, Yida +5LLM Agent EvaluationPolicy Evaluation

    Alex · Emory University Atlanta, USA · Andrew +1

  12. Tail-Influence Sampling for CVaR Policy Evaluation

    Sep 29, 2026Pauline Bourigault, Xiaotong Ji, Matthieu Zimmer +2Policy EvaluationAdaptive Sampling

    Imperial College London · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab · UCL Centre for AI

  13. When Better Gets Worse: Improvement Fidelity for Self-Improving Agents in Adaptive Worlds

    Sep 26, 2026Ke Wang, Zijie Zhao, Zhiyi Yuan +1Self-Improving AgentsAI Agent Evaluation

    University of Cambridge · Georgia Institute of Technology · Massachusetts Institute of Technology +2

  14. Evidence-Grounded Auditing of Identification Assumptions in Climate-Policy Causal Evaluations

    Sep 25, 2026Yonghong Zhang, Yong Xie, Isabel M. Parra +1Causal InferencePolicy Evaluation

    Department of Finance, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain · Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

  15. Limiting-Kernel Q(λλ): Bridging Short and Long Horizons

    Sep 23, 2026Tolga Ok, Arman Sharifi Kolarijani, Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani +1Value Function EstimationPolicy Evaluation

    Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands · Alpha Brain Technologies, The Netherlands · University of Toronto, Canada

  16. A Policy Profile for Croissant: Refusal as a Property of the Dataset

    Sep 17, 2026Alexander ChernovPolicy EvaluationAccess Control

    Independent Researcher Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  17. Can Large Language Models Anticipate Behavioral Responses to Social Policies? A Case of Pension Enrollment Prediction among China's Flexible Workers

    Sep 4, 2026Yumiao Li, Peixin Liu, Donglin Di +2LLM EvaluationPolicy Evaluation

    School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Actuarial Science and Risk Management, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA · School of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

  18. Integrating adaptive human behavior into epidemic models with large language models

    Aug 30, 2026Yicheng Mao, Haoyang Li, Rob Deardon +1Epidemic ForecastingLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Calgary, University Drive NW, Calgary, T2N 1N4, Canada · Department of Systems & Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA · Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Calgary, University Drive NW, Calgary, T2N 1N4, Canada

  19. Evaluator-Dependent Patient-Adaptive ECG Lead-Channel Allocation

    Aug 27, 2026Xiaoyang Li, Zeyan TaoElectrocardiographyPolicy Evaluation

    College of Medicine and Biological Information Engineering Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

  20. Robust Data-Collection Policy Learning for Low-Variance Online Policy Evaluation

    Aug 25, 2026Claire Chen, Shuze Daniel Liu, Licheng Luo +3Policy LearningPolicy Evaluation

    California Institute of Technology · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Purdue University +3

  21. Europe's Climate Ambition Under Scrutiny: Evidence from Deep Learning Emission Projections

    Aug 19, 2026Jacopo Ghirri, Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Lara Aleluia Reis +1Policy Evaluation

    Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, Milan, 20133, Italy · CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Via Marco Biagi 5, Lecce, 73100, Italy · RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, Via Bergognone 34, Milan, 20144, Italy

  22. Reinforcement Learning as (Discrete) Potential Theory

    Aug 17, 2026Christopher ConnollyReinforcement LearningPolicy Evaluation

    Computer Science Laboratory SRI International

  23. An Evaluation Framework for National AI Regulation

    Aug 15, 2026Kaushik Sanjay Prabhakar, Tarun Adarsh R S, Amal Dhivyan Gregory +3AI GovernancePolicy Evaluation

    University of Illinois Chicago · Vellore Institute of Technology · University of Michigan Law School

  24. Platform Adaptation Under Governance Interventions: Actor Best-Response Modeling and an External Public-Case Benchmark

    Aug 15, 2026Wesley Shu, Peng WeiPolicy Evaluation

    The Institute of Energetic Paradigm · College of Plant Protection, Southwest University

  25. Second-Order Policy Effects as State Transitions: A Source-Linked Benchmark for Policy Simulation

    Aug 15, 2026Wesley ShuPolicy Evaluation

    The Institute of Energetic Paradigm

  26. Fast A/B/n Testing: Exact Multi-Policy Comparison via Tree-Coupled Feedback Sharing

    Aug 13, 2026Yuxiao WenPolicy EvaluationA/b Testing

    Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

  27. Self-Normalized Inference for Constant-Stepsize Temporal-Difference Learning under Markovian Sampling

    Aug 11, 2026Min Zeng, Yichen Zhang, Xiaofeng ShaoConfidence Region EstimationStochastic Approximation

    Department of Biostatistics, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Department of Quantitative Methods, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA · Department of Statistics and Data Science, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA +1

  28. Observational Policy Ranking for SMB Financial Guidance from Multi-Action Accounting Logs

    Aug 10, 2026Shrutendra Harsola, Vignesh Subrahmaniam, Vikas Raturi +7Causal Effect EstimationConditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation

    1Foresight-AI, Intuit

  29. UpliftBench: Revealing Outcome-Regime and Objective Mismatch in Uplift Evaluation

    Aug 2, 2026Binshuang LiConditional Average Treatment Effect EstimationBenchmark Design

    Independent Researcher USA

  30. An Instrument to Evaluate Governance Proposals: AI Policy Analysis at Scale

    Jul 30, 2026Paulo Carvao, Claudio Mayrink Verdun, Isabel Adler +1LLM EvaluationPolicy Evaluation

    Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government · Harvard Kennedy School · Harvard Kennedy School of Government +2