Before revision:  In this paper, we build on classical results in semiparametric efficiency theory to develop quasi-optimal methods for policy learning; in particular, we propose a class of policy value estimators that, when optimized, yield regret bounds for the learned policy that scale with the semiparametric efficient variance for policy evaluation. On a practical level, our result suggests new methods for policy learning motivated by semiparametric efficiency theory .
After revision:  In this paper, we derive lower bounds for the minimax regret of policy learning under constraints, and propose a method that attains this bound asymptotically up to a constant factor. Whenever the class of policies under consideration has a bounded Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension, we show that the problem of minimax-regret policy learning can be asymptotically reduced to first efficiently evaluating how much each candidate policy improves over a randomized baseline, and then maximizing this value estimate. Our analysis relies on uniform generalizations of classical semiparametric efficiency results for average treatment effect estimation, paired with sharp concentration bounds for weighted empirical risk minimization that may be of independent interest .