In Figure 9 we provide bias and MSE analysis of different algorithms on the domains that exhibit passive non-stationarity.

Summary and Contributions: In this paper, the authors introduce a novel model-free, policy improvement-based algorithm, for smooth non-stationary Markov decision processes (NS-MDP), focusing on safety guarantees of their method. The method relies heavily on Assumption 1 (Smooth performance), implicitly assumed in [51], which enables the treatment of the off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the NS-MDP as a time-series forecasting (TSF) problem. The authors introduce safe policy improvement for NS-MDPs, which they term SPIN, which, under Assumption 1, iterates between a policy evaluation step and a policy improvement step. Importance sampling is used for OPE according to past evaluation samples. Then TSF is applied to estimate future performance, while wild bootstrapping is used to obtain uncertainty estimates for future performance.

This study builds on person perception and human AI interaction (HAII) theories to investigate how content and source cues, specifically race, ethnicity, and nationality, affect judgments of AI-generated content in a high-stakes self-presentation context: college applications. Results of a pre-registered experiment with a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 644) show that content heuristics, such as linguistic style, played a dominant role in AI detection. Source heuristics, such as nationality, also emerged as a significant factor, with international students more likely to be perceived as using AI, especially when their statements included AI-sounding features. Interestingly, Asian and Hispanic applicants were more likely to be judged as AI users when labeled as domestic students, suggesting interactions between racial stereotypes and AI detection. AI attribution led to lower perceptions of personal statement quality and authenticity, as well as negative evaluations of the applicant's competence, sociability, morality, and future success.

Measuring sales performance is a crucial aspect of running a successful business. Accurately tracking and analyzing sales data helps companies understand their strengths and weaknesses, perform forecasts, identify trends, and make informed decisions that drive growth. In this article, I will illuminate how some simple statistical models can be used for measuring sales performance. Whether it is a small or enterprise sales team, simple quantitative techniques can be used to provide valuable sales insights or draw attention to areas of need. After reading this article, you will see various examples how simple models are applied in real life scenarios. Note: All the images in the article were generated by Artificial Intelligence using Stable Diffusion 2.x.

Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes due to external factors (passive non-stationarity), changes induced by interactions with the system itself (active non-stationarity), or both (hybrid non-stationarity). In this work, we take the first steps towards the fundamental challenge of on-policy and off-policy evaluation amidst structured changes due to active, passive, or hybrid non-stationarity. Towards this goal, we make a higher-order stationarity assumption such that non-stationarity results in changes over time, but the way changes happen is fixed. We propose, OPEN, an algorithm that uses a double application of counterfactual reasoning and a novel importance-weighted instrument-variable regression to obtain both a lower bias and a lower variance estimate of the structure in the changes of a policy's past performances. Finally, we show promising results on how OPEN can be used to predict future performances for several domains inspired by real-world applications that exhibit non-stationarity.