Related papers: PAC-Bayesian Analysis of the Exploration-Exploitat…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…
Ecologists increasingly rely on Bayesian methods to fit capture-recapture models. Capture-recapture models are used to estimate abundance while accounting for imperfect detectability in individual-level data. A variety of implementations…
This paper proposes a new randomized strategy for adaptive MCMC using Bayesian optimization. This approach applies to non-differentiable objective functions and trades off exploration and exploitation to reduce the number of potentially…
Bayesian decision analysis is a useful method for risk management decisions, but is limited in its ability to consider severe uncertainty in knowledge, and value ambiguity in management objectives. We study the use of robust Bayesian…
Mutual independence is a key concept in statistics that characterizes the structural relationships between variables. Existing methods to investigate mutual independence rely on the definition of two competing models, one being nested into…
The predominance of machine learning models in many spheres of human activity has led to a growing demand for their transparency. The transparency of models makes it possible to discern some factors, such as security or non-discrimination.…
Qualitative probabilistic reasoning in a Bayesian network often reveals tradeoffs: relationships that are ambiguous due to competing qualitative influences. We present two techniques that combine qualitative and numeric probabilistic…
Bayesian optimization is a sample-efficient approach to global optimization that relies on theoretically motivated value heuristics (acquisition functions) to guide its search process. Fully maximizing acquisition functions produces the…
Probabilistic generative modeling of data distributions can potentially exploit hidden information which is useful for discriminative classification. This observation has motivated the development of approaches that couple generative and…
Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system…
Our comment on Garc\'ia-Donato et al. (2025). "Model uncertainty and missing data: An objective Bayesian perspective" explores a further extension of the proposed methodology. Specifically, we consider the sequential setting where…
In certain complex optimization tasks, it becomes necessary to use multiple measures to characterize the performance of different algorithms. This paper presents a method that combines ordinal effect sizes with Pareto dominance to analyze…
In this paper, we present refined probabilistic bounds on empirical reward estimates for off-policy learning in bandit problems. We build on the PAC-Bayesian bounds from Seldin et al. (2010) and improve on their results using a new…
We introduce and study a unified Bayesian framework for extended feature allocations which flexibly captures interactions -- such as repulsion or attraction -- among features and their associated weights. We provide a complete Bayesian…
Comparing competing mathematical models of complex natural processes is a shared goal among many branches of science. The Bayesian probabilistic framework offers a principled way to perform model comparison and extract useful metrics for…
Recent discussion in the public sphere about algorithmic classification has involved tension between competing notions of what it means for a probabilistic classification to be fair to different groups. We formalize three fairness…
We study the problem of causal discovery through targeted interventions. Starting from few observational measurements, we follow a Bayesian active learning approach to perform those experiments which, in expectation with respect to the…
The PAC-Bayesian approach is a powerful set of techniques to derive non- asymptotic risk bounds for random estimators. The corresponding optimal distribution of estimators, usually called the Gibbs posterior, is unfortunately intractable.…
We propose a simple yet effective solution to tackle the often-competing goals of fairness and utility in classification tasks. While fairness ensures that the model's predictions are unbiased and do not discriminate against any particular…
Machine learning models are deployed as a central component in decision making and policy operations with direct impact on individuals' lives. In order to act ethically and comply with government regulations, these models need to make fair…