Related papers: Context-Based Information Retrieval in Risky Envir…
A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to…
We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…
This paper considers a contextual bandit problem involving multiple agents, where a learner sequentially observes the contexts and the agent's reported arms, and then selects the arm that maximizes the system's overall reward. Existing work…
Efficient reinforcement learning (RL) involves a trade-off between "exploitative" actions that maximise expected reward and "explorative'" ones that sample unvisited states. To encourage exploration, recent approaches proposed adding…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) like BERT and GPT-4 have become the foundation for modern information retrieval (IR) systems. However, existing PLM-based IR models primarily rely on the knowledge learned during training for prediction,…
Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…
Conversational Information Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging field of Information Retrieval (IR) at the intersection of interactive IR and dialogue systems for open domain information needs. In order to optimize these interactions and enhance…
The goal of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is to build agents that can quickly learn new tasks by leveraging prior experience on related tasks. Learning a new task often requires both exploring to gather task-relevant information and…
Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…
Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…
This paper addresses the exploration-exploitation dilemma inherent in decision-making, focusing on multi-armed bandit problems. The problems involve an agent deciding whether to exploit current knowledge for immediate gains or explore new…
Intrinsic rewards for exploration in reinforcement learning condition on different contexts: lifelong rewards score each transition against accumulated experience but ignore within-rollout redundancy; episodic rewards penalize…
Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…
Most successful information extraction systems operate with access to a large collection of documents. In this work, we explore the task of acquiring and incorporating external evidence to improve extraction accuracy in domains where the…
Cross-situational word learning is based on the notion that a learner can determine the referent of a word by finding something in common across many observed uses of that word. Here we propose an adaptive learning algorithm that contains a…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…
This work addresses the problem of exploration in an unknown environment. For linear dynamical systems, we use an experimental design framework and introduce an online greedy policy where the control maximizes the information of the next…
We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…