This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e.

Correctness: The main technical content seems to be correct. I have the following questions though: When using the linear assumption for the reward and the dynamics, the feature selection/setting is crutial. To relax the linear assumption, it is also mentioned, features can be pre-trained. What would be the recommended way to pre-learn it? For possible violation of the assumptions, how it would affect the results in practice?

This is a borderline paper. The paper is technically sound and addressing OPE in average-reward setting is an important problem. Despite that the work is an extension of Duan and Wang (for discounted setting) to the average-reward setting, the algorithm is somewhat different, as Duan and Wang uses FQE whereas the current paper performs stationary-distribution estimation. That said, there are a few weaknesses that the paper should try to address or at least discuss: 1. The entropy maximization is a novel algorithmic element which does not appear in previous approaches in the discounted setting.

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. In a more general setting, when the feature dynamics are approximately linear and for arbitrary rewards, we propose a new approach for estimating stationary distributions with function approximation. We formulate this problem as finding the maximum-entropy distribution subject to matching feature expectations under empirical dynamics. We show that this results in an exponential-family distribution whose sufficient statistics are the features, paralleling maximum-entropy approaches in supervised learning.

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known features), we provide the first finite-sample OPE error bound, extending existing results beyond the episodic and discounted cases. In a more general setting, when the feature dynamics are approximately linear and for arbitrary rewards, we propose a new approach for estimating stationary distributions with function approximation. We formulate this problem as finding the maximum-entropy distribution subject to matching feature expectations under empirical dynamics. We show that this results in an exponential-family distribution whose sufficient statistics are the features, paralleling maximum-entropy approaches in supervised learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OPE approaches in multiple environments.