Related papers: The Externalities of Exploration and How Data Dive…
We study online decision making problems under resource constraints, where both reward and cost functions are drawn from distributions that may change adversarially over time. We focus on two canonical settings: $(i)$ online resource…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise to become autonomous agents, they often explore suboptimally in sequential decision-making. Recent work has sought to enhance this capability via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement…
Personalization is pervasive in the online space as it leads to higher efficiency and revenue by allowing the most relevant content to be served to each user. However, recent studies suggest that personalization methods can propagate…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
We study the impact of sharing exploration in multi-armed bandits in a grouped setting where a set of groups have overlapping feasible action sets [Baek and Farias '24]. In this grouped bandit setting, groups share reward observations, and…
Many networks are used to transfer information or goods, in other words, they are navigated. The larger the network, the more difficult it is to navigate efficiently. Indeed, information routing in the Internet faces serious scalability…
The human intrinsic desire to pursue knowledge, also known as curiosity, is considered essential in the process of skill acquisition. With the aid of artificial curiosity, we could equip current techniques for control, such as Reinforcement…
How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…
We consider the exploration problem: an agent equipped with a depth sensor must map out a previously unknown environment using as few sensor measurements as possible. We propose an approach based on supervised learning of a greedy…
Motivated by settings in which predictive models may be required to be non-discriminatory with respect to certain attributes (such as race), but even collecting the sensitive attribute may be forbidden or restricted, we initiate the study…
Collective behavior in online social media and networks is known to be capable of generating non-intuitive dynamics associated with crowd wisdom and herd behaviour. Even though these topics have been well-studied in social science, the…
Recent growing adoption of experimentation in practice has led to a surge of attention to multiarmed bandits as a technique to reduce the opportunity cost of online experiments. In this setting, a decision-maker sequentially chooses among a…
We consider the allocation of limited resources to heterogeneous customers who arrive in an online fashion. We would like to allocate the resources "fairly", so that no group of customers is marginalized in terms of their overall service…
The problem of online learning with graph feedback has been extensively studied in the literature due to its generality and potential to model various learning tasks. Existing works mainly study the adversarial and stochastic feedback…
Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…
Multi-armed bandit problems are receiving a great deal of attention because they adequately formalize the exploration-exploitation trade-offs arising in several industrially relevant applications, such as online advertisement and, more…
We study the similarity search problem which aims to find the similar query results according to a set of given data and a query string. To balance the result number and result quality, we combine query result diversity with query…
Contextual bandits have the same exploration-exploitation trade-off as standard multi-armed bandits. On adding positive externalities that decay with time, this problem becomes much more difficult as wrong decisions at the start are hard to…
The design of data markets has gained importance as firms increasingly use machine learning models fueled by externally acquired training data. A key consideration is the externalities firms face when data, though inherently freely…
The contextual duelling bandit problem models adaptive recommender systems, where the algorithm presents a set of items to the user, and the user's choice reveals their preference. This setup is well suited for implicit choices users make…