Related papers: Context-Based Information Retrieval in Risky Envir…

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…

Directed Exploration is a crucial challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when rewards are sparse. Information-directed sampling (IDS), which optimizes the information ratio, seeks to do so by augmenting regret with information…

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…

In many predictive contexts (e.g., credit lending), true outcomes are only observed for samples that were positively classified in the past. These past observations, in turn, form training datasets for classifiers that make future…

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

A recommender system is an information filtering technology which can be used to predict preference ratings of items (products, services, movies, etc) and/or to output a ranking of items that are likely to be of interest to the user.…

For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. This paper considers an RL setting where the agent obtains information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate…

Real-world contextual bandit problems with complex reward models are often tackled with iteratively trained models, such as boosting trees. However, it is difficult to directly apply simple and effective exploration strategies--such as…

Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative…

As the adoption of federated learning increases for learning from sensitive data local to user devices, it is natural to ask if the learning can be done using implicit signals generated as users interact with the applications of interest,…

We introduce exploration potential, a quantity that measures how much a reinforcement learning agent has explored its environment class. In contrast to information gain, exploration potential takes the problem's reward structure into…

We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…

We consider a setting for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) where the learner is extended with the ability to actively select multiple environments, observing an agent's behavior on each environment. We first demonstrate that if the…

Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms are ubiquitous and necessary to explore the extensive catalogs of media providers. To avoid the user examining all the results, its preferences are used to provide a subset of relatively small size. The…

Decision-making problems often feature uncertainty stemming from heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences. To address this, we propose a sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline to learn preference distributions and…

The budgeted information gathering problem - where a robot with a fixed fuel budget is required to maximize the amount of information gathered from the world - appears in practice across a wide range of applications in autonomous…

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

We consider risk-averse learning in repeated unknown games where the goal of the agents is to minimize their individual risk of incurring significantly high cost. Specifically, the agents use the conditional value at risk (CVaR) as a risk…