Related papers: Combining Difficulty Ranking with Multi-Armed Band…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at general-purpose tasks, yet adapting their responses to individual users remains challenging. Retrieval augmentation provides a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning by conditioning LLMs on user history…
We investigate the impact of content sequencing on student learning outcomes in a first-year university electromagnetism course. Using a custom-built online system, the McGill Learning Platform (McLEAP), we test student problem-solving…
We consider the problem of learning in single-player and multiplayer multiarmed bandit models. Bandit problems are classes of online learning problems that capture exploration versus exploitation tradeoffs. In a multiarmed bandit model,…
Ranking system is the core part of modern retrieval and recommender systems, where the goal is to rank candidate items given user contexts. Optimizing ranking systems online means that the deployed system can serve user requests, e.g.,…
Automated algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning facilitates the application of machine learning. Traditional multi-armed bandit strategies look to the history of observed rewards to identify the most promising arms for optimizing…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…
In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…
Automated Essay Scoring (AES) faces significant challenges in cross-prompt settings, where models must generalize to unseen writing prompts. To address this limitation, we propose MAPLE, a meta-learning framework that leverages prototypical…
The Explainable Recommendation task is designed to receive a pair of user and item and output explanations to justify why an item is recommended to a user. Many models approach review generation as a proxy for explainable recommendations.…
Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…
We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…
Relevance ranking and result diversification are two core areas in modern recommender systems. Relevance ranking aims at building a ranked list sorted in decreasing order of item relevance, while result diversification focuses on generating…
The primary goal of my Ph.D. study is to develop provably efficient and practical algorithms for data-driven sequential decision-making under uncertainty. My work focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), multi-armed bandits, and their…
Contextual multi-armed bandits provide powerful tools to solve the exploitation-exploration dilemma in decision making, with direct applications in the personalized recommendation. In fact, collaborative effects among users carry the…
Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…
New ranking algorithms are continually being developed and refined, necessitating the development of efficient methods for evaluating these rankers. Online ranker evaluation focuses on the challenge of efficiently determining, from implicit…
In many web applications, a recommendation is not a single item suggested to a user but a list of possibly interesting contents that may be ranked in some contexts. The combinatorial bandit problem has been studied quite extensively these…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of diverse user preference on learning under the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. We aim to show that when the user preferences are sufficiently diverse and each arm can be optimal for…
Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…
We consider a multiobjective multiarmed bandit problem with lexicographically ordered objectives. In this problem, the goal of the learner is to select arms that are lexicographic optimal as much as possible without knowing the arm reward…