English
Related papers

Related papers: Faster Rates for Policy Learning

200 papers

This paper studies the one-shot behavior of no-regret algorithms for stochastic bandits. Although many algorithms are known to be asymptotically optimal with respect to the expected regret, over a single run, their pseudo-regret seems to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Victor Boone

The need for fast and robust optimization algorithms are of critical importance in all areas of machine learning. This paper treats the task of designing optimization algorithms as an optimal control problem. Using regret as a metric for an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-21 Philippe Casgrain , Anastasis Kratsios

Meta reinforcement learning sets a distribution over a set of tasks on which the agent can train at will, then is asked to learn an optimal policy for any test task efficiently. In this paper, we consider a finite set of tasks modeled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Mirco Mutti , Aviv Tamar

In a typical optimization problem, the task is to pick one of a number of options with the lowest cost or the highest value. In practice, these cost/value quantities often come through processes such as measurement or machine learning,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammad Mahdian , Jieming Mao , Kangning Wang

The performance measure of an algorithm is a crucial part of its analysis. The performance can be determined by the study on the convergence rate of the algorithm in question. It is necessary to study some (hopefully convergent) sequence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-07-25 Sandra Astete-Morales , Marie-Liesse Cauwet , Olivier Teytaud

Optimization models used to make discrete decisions often contain uncertain parameters that are context-dependent and estimated through prediction. To account for the quality of the decision made based on the prediction, decision-focused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Noah Schutte , Krzysztof Postek , Neil Yorke-Smith

We study the problem of expert advice under partial bandit feedback setting and create a sequential minimax optimal algorithm. Our algorithm works with a more general partial monitoring setting, where, in contrast to the classical bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Kaan Gokcesu , Hakan Gokcesu

We address online linear optimization problems when the possible actions of the decision maker are represented by binary vectors. The regret of the decision maker is the difference between her realized loss and the best loss she would have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-04-02 Jean-Yves Audibert , Sébastien Bubeck , Gábor Lugosi

We provide improved gap-dependent regret bounds for reinforcement learning in finite episodic Markov decision processes. Compared to prior work, our bounds depend on alternative definitions of gaps. These definitions are based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Christoph Dann , Teodor V. Marinov , Mehryar Mohri , Julian Zimmert

Reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from slow convergence due to sparse reward signals, particularly in complex environments where feedback is delayed or infrequent. This paper introduces the Psychological Regret Model (PRM), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Zhe Xu

We study fast rates of convergence in the setting of nonparametric online regression, namely where regret is defined with respect to an arbitrary function class which has bounded complexity. Our contributions are two-fold: - In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Constantinos Daskalakis , Noah Golowich

Reinforcement learning with multinomial logistic (MNL) function approximation has become an important framework due to its flexibility and broad applicability. While existing studies have established regret guarantees under worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Wonyoung Kim , Min-Hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi

We consider sequential decision making in a setting where regret is measured with respect to a set of stateful reference policies, and feedback is limited to observing the rewards of the actions performed (the so called "bandit" setting).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-07-30 Uriel Feige , Tomer Koren , Moshe Tennenholtz

The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-01 Daniel Russo , David Tse , Benjamin Van Roy

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Yilie Huang , Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

It has been recently shown that, under the margin (or low noise) assumption, there exist classifiers attaining fast rates of convergence of the excess Bayes risk, that is, rates faster than $n^{-1/2}$. The work on this subject has suggested…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-09-29 Jean-Yves Audibert , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

A fundamental challenge in machine learning is the choice of a loss as it characterizes our learning task, is minimized in the training phase, and serves as an evaluation criterion for estimators. Proper losses are commonly chosen, ensuring…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Han Bao , Asuka Takatsu

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with deterministic transitions and study the problem of regret minimization, which is central to the analysis and design of optimal learning algorithms. We present logarithmic problem-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Damianos Tranos , Alexandre Proutiere