Related papers: The Externalities of Exploration and How Data Dive…
The use of algorithmic decision making systems in domains which impact the financial, social, and political well-being of people has created a demand for these decision making systems to be "fair" under some accepted notion of equity. This…
A fundamental question for companies with large amount of logged data is: How to use such logged data together with incoming streaming data to make good decisions? Many companies currently make decisions via online A/B tests, but wrong…
In many areas of medicine, security, and life sciences, we want to allocate limited resources to different sources in order to detect extreme values. In this paper, we study an efficient way to allocate these resources sequentially under…
In this paper we prove the efficacy of a simple greedy algorithm for a finite horizon online resource allocation/matching problem, when the corresponding static planning linear program (SPP) exhibits a non-degeneracy condition called the…
Logistic Bandits have recently undergone careful scrutiny by virtue of their combined theoretical and practical relevance. This research effort delivered statistically efficient algorithms, improving the regret of previous strategies by…
An unexpected difference between online and offline algorithms is observed. The natural greedy algorithms are shown to be worst case online optimal for Online Independent Set and Online Vertex Cover on graphs with 'enough' isolated…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
We describe mechanisms for the allocation of a scarce resource among multiple users in a way that is efficient, fair, and strategy-proof, but when users do not know their resource requirements. The mechanism is repeated for multiple rounds…
The main objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework to analyse how humans' decision-making strategies under uncertainty manage the trade-off between information gathering (exploration) and reward seeking (exploitation). A…
Reinforcement learning agents need a reward signal to learn successful policies. When this signal is sparse or the corresponding gradient is deceptive, such agents need a dedicated mechanism to efficiently explore their search space without…
Students of Computer Science often wonder when, exactly, one can apply a greedy algorithm to a problem, and when one must use the more complicated and time-consuming techniques of dynamic programming. This paper argues that the existing…
We introduce and study a multi-class online resource allocation problem with group fairness guarantees. The problem involves allocating a fixed amount of resources to a sequence of agents, each belonging to a specific group. The primary…
Institutions and investors are constantly faced with the challenge of appropriately distributing endowments. No budget is limitless and optimising overall spending without sacrificing positive outcomes has been approached and resolved using…
Optimization is widely used for decision making across various domains, valued for its ability to improve efficiency. However, poor implementation practices can lead to unintended consequences, particularly in socioeconomic contexts where…
Most exploration algorithms search broadly until uncertainty is resolved. When the action space is too large to resolve within budget, practitioners default to $\varepsilon$-greedy, which bounds disruption but spends its override blindly.…
We introduce in this paper an algorithm named Contextuel-E-Greedy that tackles the dynamicity of the user's content. It is based on dynamic exploration/exploitation tradeoff and can adaptively balance the two aspects by deciding which…
We pose uncertainty quantification and exploration in online decision-making as a problem of training and generation from an autoregressive sequence model, an area experiencing rapid innovation. Our approach rests on viewing uncertainty as…
How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…
Global Majority users are exposed to multitudes of harm when interacting with online platforms. This essay illuminates how exploitation in the advances of Artificial Intelligence is tied to historical exploitation and how the use of blanket…
We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…