Related papers: Policy Search with High-Dimensional Context Variab…
We introduce the first direct policy search algorithm which provably converges to the globally optimal $\textit{dynamic}$ filter for the classical problem of predicting the outputs of a linear dynamical system, given noisy, partial…
Heuristic forward search is currently the dominant paradigm in classical planning. Forward search algorithms typically rely on a single, relatively simple variation of best-first search and remain fixed throughout the process of solving a…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…
Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…
Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…
We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…
High-dimensional big data appears in many research fields such as image recognition, biology and collaborative filtering. Often, the exploration of such data by classic algorithms is encountered with difficulties due to `curse of…
We explore linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques for statistical inference of parameters in cosmology. Given the importance of compressing the increasingly complex data vectors used in cosmology, we address questions…
Deep reinforcement learning has obtained significant breakthroughs in recent years. Most methods in deep-RL achieve good results via the maximization of the reward signal provided by the environment, typically in the form of discounted…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) form the cornerstone of sequential decision-making agent development, they have inherent limitations in high-frequency decision tasks. Existing research mainly focuses on discrete embodied decision…
We present a method for using adverb phrases to adjust skill parameters via learned adverb-skill groundings. These groundings allow an agent to use adverb feedback provided by a human to directly update a skill policy, in a manner similar…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used to learn effective heuristics for solving complex combinatorial optimisation problem via policy networks and have demonstrated promising performance. Existing works have focused on solving…
A natural way to improve the detection of objects is to consider the contextual constraints imposed by the detection of additional objects in a given scene. In this work, we exploit the spatial relations between objects in order to improve…
We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…
In product search, users tend to browse results on multiple search result pages (SERPs) (e.g., for queries on clothing and shoes) before deciding which item to purchase. Users' clicks can be considered as implicit feedback which indicates…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…
Most methods in reinforcement learning use a Policy Gradient (PG) approach to learn a parametric stochastic policy that maps states to actions. The standard approach is to implement such a mapping via a neural network (NN) whose parameters…
Discovering the underlying dynamics of complex systems from data is an important practical topic. Constrained optimization algorithms are widely utilized and lead to many successes. Yet, such purely data-driven methods may bring about…
Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of…
Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…