Related papers: Explore or exploit? A generic model and an exactly…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
We study a minimal model for the growth of a phenotypically heterogeneous population of cells subject to a fluctuating environment in which they can replicate (by exploiting available resources) and modify their phenotype within a given…
Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…
Adaptive exploration methods propose ways to learn complex policies via alternating between exploration and exploitation. An important question for such methods is to determine the appropriate moment to switch between exploration and…
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.…
We analyze export data aggregated at world global level of 219 classes of products over a period of 39 years. Our main goal is to set up a dynamical model to identify and quantify plausible mechanisms by which the evolutions of the various…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
How to best exploit patchy resources? This long-standing question belongs to the extensively studied class of explore/exploit problems that arise in a wide range of situations, from animal foraging, to robotic exploration, and to human…
Following some recent works, we investigate the problem of optimising the total population size for logistic diffusive models with respect to resources distributions. Using the spatially heterogeneous Fisher-KPP equation, we obtain a…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
In this paper, we study the exploration / exploitation trade-off in cellular genetic algorithms. We define a new selection scheme, the centric selection, which is tunable and allows controlling the selective pressure with a single…
Known as two cornerstones of problem solving by search, exploitation and exploration are extensively discussed for implementation and application of evolutionary algorithms (EAs). However, only a few researches focus on evaluation and…
The tradeoff between accuracy and speed is considered fundamental to individual and collective decision-making. In this paper, we focus on collective estimation as an example of collective decision-making. The task is to estimate the…
Optimal transport has become part of the standard quantitative economics toolbox. It is the framework of choice to describe models of matching with transfers, but beyond that, it allows to: extend quantile regression; identify discrete…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
The rapid advances in the field of optimization methods in many pure and applied science pose the difficulty of keeping track of the developments as well as selecting an appropriate technique that best suits the problem in-hand. From a…
Consider a species whose population density solves the steady diffusive logistic equation in a heterogeneous environment modeled with the help of a spatially non constant coefficient standing for a resources distribution in a given box. We…
Exploration-exploitation of functions, that is learning and optimizing a mapping between inputs and expected outputs, is ubiquitous to many real world situations. These situations sometimes require us to avoid certain outcomes at all cost,…
We introduce a highly stylized, yet non trivial model of the economy, with a public and private sector coupled through a wealth tax and a redistribution policy. The model can be fully solved analytically, and allows one to address the…
We study the problem of determining an effective exploration strategy in static and non-linear optimization problems, which depend on an unknown scalar parameter to be learned from online collected noisy data. An optimal trade-off between…