Semi-Parametric Efficient Policy Learning with Continuous Actions

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated from data. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value function takes a known parametric form in the treatment, but we are agnostic on how it depends on the observed contexts. We propose a doubly robust off-policy estimate for this setting and show that off-policy optimization based on this doubly robust estimate is robust to estimation errors of the policy function or the regression model. We also show that the variance of our off-policy estimate achieves the semi-parametric efficiency bound.