Related papers: The Externalities of Exploration and How Data Dive…
Maximizing long-term rewards is the primary goal in sequential decision-making problems. The majority of existing methods assume that side information is freely available, enabling the learning agent to observe all features' states before…
We study an online mixed discrete and continuous optimization problem where a decision maker interacts with an unknown environment for a number of $T$ rounds. At each round, the decision maker needs to first jointly choose a discrete and a…
Collective foragers, from animals to robotic swarms, must balance exploration and exploitation to locate sparse resources efficiently. While social learning is known to facilitate this balance, how the range of information sharing shapes…
We propose a new learning framework that captures the tiered structure of many real-world user-interaction applications, where the users can be divided into two groups based on their different tolerance on exploration risks and should be…
This dissertation examines three distinct big data analytics problems related to the social aspects of consumers' choices. The main goal of this line of research is to help two sided platform firms to target their marketing policies given…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring unknown environments with autonomous agents. We model the environment as a graph with edge weights and analyze the task of visiting all vertices of the graph at least once. The hardness of…
One of the important yet insufficiently studied subjects in fair allocation is the externality effect among agents. For a resource allocation problem, externalities imply that a bundle allocated to an agent may affect the utilities of other…
Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…
We study a simple model of algorithmic collusion in which Q-learning algorithms are designed in a strategic fashion. We let players (\textit{designers}) choose their exploration policy simultaneously prior to letting their algorithms…
During the last decade of network research focusing on structural and dynamical properties of networks, the role of network users has been more or less underestimated from the bird's-eye view of global perspective. In this era of global…
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…
A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…
This paper views hiring as a contextual bandit problem: to find the best workers over time, firms must balance exploitation (selecting from groups with proven track records) with exploration (selecting from under-represented groups to learn…
The notion of \emph{policy regret} in online learning is a well defined? performance measure for the common scenario of adaptive adversaries, which more traditional quantities such as external regret do not take into account. We revisit the…
This paper aims to investigate and achieve seller-side fairness within online marketplaces, where many sellers and their items are not sufficiently exposed to customers in an e-commerce platform. This phenomenon raises concerns regarding…
Exploitation universally emerges in various decision-making contexts, e.g., animals foraging, web surfing, the evolution of scientists' research topics, and our daily lives. Despite its ubiquity, exploitation, which refers to the behavior…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
Rankings on online platforms help their end-users find the relevant information -- people, news, media, and products -- quickly. Fair ranking tasks, which ask to rank a set of items to maximize utility subject to satisfying group-fairness…
Most of the existing algorithms for fair division do not consider externalities. Under externalities, the utility an agent obtains depends not only on its allocation but also on the allocation of other agents. An agent has a positive…