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Related papers: Learning Valuation Functions

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We study the task of bandit learning, also known as best-arm identification, under the assumption that the true reward function f belongs to a known, but arbitrary, function class F. We seek a general theory of bandit learnability, akin to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Nataly Brukhim , Aldo Pacchiano , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

Despite exceptional predictive performance of Deep sequence models (DSMs), the main concern of their deployment centers around the lack of uncertainty awareness. In contrast, probabilistic models quantify the uncertainty associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Wenlong Chen

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

We study the problem of pure exploration in matching markets under uncertain preferences, where the goal is to identify a stable matching with confidence parameter $\delta$ and minimal sample complexity. Agents learn preferences via…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Tejas Pagare , Agniv Bandyopadhyay , Sandeep Juneja

We consider learning of submodular functions from data. These functions are important in machine learning and have a wide range of applications, e.g. data summarization, feature selection and active learning. Despite their combinatorial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-18 Sebastian Tschiatschek , Aytunc Sahin , Andreas Krause

In many real-world learning scenarios, features are only acquirable at a cost constrained under a budget. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for cost-sensitive feature acquisition at the prediction-time. The suggested method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Mohammad Kachuee , Orpaz Goldstein , Kimmo Karkkainen , Sajad Darabi , Majid Sarrafzadeh

We explore methods for option discovery based on variational inference and make two algorithmic contributions. First: we highlight a tight connection between variational option discovery methods and variational autoencoders, and introduce…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-30 Joshua Achiam , Harrison Edwards , Dario Amodei , Pieter Abbeel

We investigate the statistical properties of Temporal Difference (TD) learning with Polyak-Ruppert averaging, arguably one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement learning, for the task of estimating the parameters of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Weichen Wu , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Alessandro Rinaldo

Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Sydney M. Katz , Amir Maleki , Erdem Bıyık , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

We study the problem of representation learning in goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning. In such hierarchical structures, a higher-level controller solves tasks by iteratively communicating goals which a lower-level policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Nianli Peng , Muhang Tian , Brandon Fain

This paper studies the optimal dividend problem with a bounded payout rate in a partially observed regime-switching diffusion model, where, in practice, the market regime is unobserved and key model parameters are unknown. To address this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-29 Zhongqin Gao , Yan Lv , Jingmin He

Submodular functions are an important class of functions in combinatorial optimization which satisfy the natural properties of decreasing marginal costs. The study of these functions has led to strong structural properties with applications…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2009-11-13 Gagan Goel , Pushkar Tripathi , Lei Wang

Distributional reinforcement learning improves performance by capturing environmental stochasticity, but a comprehensive theoretical understanding of its effectiveness remains elusive. In addition, the intractable element of the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Seokhun Ju , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Reward modeling has emerged as a crucial component in aligning large language models with human values. Significant attention has focused on using reward models as a means for fine-tuning generative models. However, the reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Christian , Hannah Rose Kirk , Jessica A. F. Thompson , Christopher Summerfield , Tsvetomira Dumbalska

We study the communication complexity of welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with bidders from either a standard valuation class (which require exponential communication to explicitly state, such as subadditive or XOS), or…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Frederick V. Qiu , S. Matthew Weinberg , Qianfan Zhang

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

Learning per-domain generalizing policies is a key challenge in learning for planning. Standard approaches learn state-value functions represented as graph neural networks using supervised learning on optimal plans generated by a teacher…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Nicola J. Müller , Moritz Oster , Isabel Valera , Jörg Hoffmann , Timo P. Gros

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang