Related papers: Optimizing an Utility Function for Exploration / E…
Online learning to rank (OL2R) has attracted great research interests in recent years, thanks to its advantages in avoiding expensive relevance labeling as required in offline supervised ranking model learning. Such a solution explores the…
This paper examines the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), a framework for improving the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that RLVR can elicit strong…
This study investigates the development of an optimal execution strategy through reinforcement learning, aiming to determine the most effective approach for traders to buy and sell inventory within a finite time horizon. Our proposed model…
Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…
Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…
Decentralized resource allocation is a key problem for large-scale autonomic (or self-managing) computing systems. Motivated by a data center scenario, we explore efficient techniques for resolving resource conflicts via cooperative…
Many real-world problems contain multiple objectives and agents, where a trade-off exists between objectives. Key to solving such problems is to exploit sparse dependency structures that exist between agents. For example, in wind farm…
We examine trade-offs among stakeholders in ad auctions. Our metrics are the revenue for the utility of the auctioneer, the number of clicks for the utility of the users and the welfare for the utility of the advertisers. We show how to…
In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to provide personalized recommendations through multi-turn natural language interactions with users. Given the strong interaction and reasoning skills of Large Language Models (LLMs), leveraging…
How do people navigate the exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off when making repeated choices with unknown rewards? We study this question through the lens of multi-armed bandit problems and introduce a novel behavioral model, Quantal…
We present a deterministic exploration mechanism for sponsored search auctions, which enables the auctioneer to learn the relevance scores of advertisers, and allows advertisers to estimate the true value of clicks generated at the auction…
In networked environments, users frequently share recommendations about content, products, services, and courses of action with others. The extent to which such recommendations are successful and adopted is highly contextual, dependent on…
Personalized news recommendation aims to provide attractive articles for readers by predicting their likelihood of clicking on a certain article. To accurately predict this probability, plenty of studies have been proposed that actively…
Recent advancements in agentic test-time scaling allow models to gather environmental feedback before committing to final actions. A key limitation of existing methods is that they typically employ undifferentiated exploration strategies,…
How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
This work is about optimal order execution, where a large order is split into several small orders to maximize the implementation shortfall. Based on the diversity of cryptocurrency exchanges, we attempt to extract cross-exchange signals by…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…