Related papers: Selecting Computations: Theory and Applications
With the goal to provide absolute lower bounds for the best possible running times that can be achieved by $(1+\lambda)$-type search heuristics on common benchmark problems, we recently suggested a dynamic programming approach that computes…
Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…
We propose and investigate a class of new algorithms for sequential decision making that interacts with \textit{a batch of users} simultaneously instead of \textit{a user} at each decision epoch. This type of batch models is motivated by…
A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…
The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…
We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…
In this paper we develop a unified approach for solving a wide class of sequential selection problems. This class includes, but is not limited to, selection problems with no-information, rank-dependent rewards, and considers both fixed as…
We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…
Human decision-making deviates from the optimal solution, that maximizes cumulative rewards, in many situations. Here we approach this discrepancy from the perspective of bounded rationality and our goal is to provide a justification for…
Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
Despite being successful in board games and reinforcement learning (RL), Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) combined with Multi Armed Bandits (MABs) has seen limited success in domain-independent classical planning until recently. Previous work…
A core challenge of evolutionary search is the need to balance between exploration of the search space and exploitation of highly fit regions. Quality-diversity search has explicitly walked this tightrope between a population's diversity…
Many machine learning systems are built to solve the hardest examples of a particular task, which often makes them large and expensive to run---especially with respect to the easier examples, which might require much less computation. For…
This paper studies the problem of globally optimizing a variable of interest that is part of a causal model in which a sequence of interventions can be performed. This problem arises in biology, operational research, communications and,…
Bayesian optimal experiments that maximize the information gained from collected data are critical to efficiently identify behavioral models. We extend a seminal method for designing Bayesian optimal experiments by introducing two…
The construction of approximate replication strategies for pricing and hedging of derivative contracts in incomplete markets is a key problem of financial engineering. Recently Reinforcement Learning algorithms for hedging under realistic…
The task of learning to pick a single preferred example out a finite set of examples, an "optimal choice problem", is a supervised machine learning problem with complex, structured input. Problems of optimal choice emerge often in various…
We propose a novel technique for analyzing adaptive sampling called the {\em Simulator}. Our approach differs from the existing methods by considering not how much information could be gathered by any fixed sampling strategy, but how…
Bayesian coresets have emerged as a promising approach for implementing scalable Bayesian inference. The Bayesian coreset problem involves selecting a (weighted) subset of the data samples, such that the posterior inference using the…
We analyze a tree search problem with an underlying Markov decision process, in which the goal is to identify the best action at the root that achieves the highest cumulative reward. We present a new tree policy that optimally allocates a…