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We investigate learning the equilibria in non-stationary multi-agent systems and address the challenges that differentiate multi-agent learning from single-agent learning. Specifically, we focus on games with bandit feedback, where testing…
Black-box optimization is increasingly used in engineering design problems where simulation-based evaluations are costly and gradients are unavailable. In this context, the optimization community has largely analyzed algorithm performance…
Optimal probabilistic approach in reinforcement learning is computationally infeasible. Its simplification consisting in neglecting difference between true environment and its model estimated using limited number of observations causes…
Algorithms proposed for solving high-dimensional optimization problems with no derivative information frequently encounter the "curse of dimensionality," becoming ineffective as the dimension of the parameter space grows. One feature of a…
The selection of the most appropriate algorithm to solve a given problem instance, known as algorithm selection, is driven by the potential to capitalize on the complementary performance of different algorithms across sets of problem…
In the incentivized exploration model, a principal aims to explore and learn over time by interacting with a sequence of self-interested agents. It has been recently understood that the main challenge in designing incentive-compatible…
The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…
Continuum-armed bandits (a.k.a., black-box or $0^{th}$-order optimization) involves optimizing an unknown objective function given an oracle that evaluates the function at a query point, with the goal of using as few query points as…
A well-balanced exploration-exploitation trade-off is crucial for successful acquisition functions in Bayesian optimization. However, there is a lack of quantitative measures for exploration, making it difficult to analyze and compare…
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…
Despite the success statistical physics has enjoyed at predicting the properties of materials for given parameters, the inverse problem, identifying which material parameters produce given, desired properties, is only beginning to be…
In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…
Numerous works study black-box attacks on image classifiers. However, these works make different assumptions on the adversary's knowledge and current literature lacks a cohesive organization centered around the threat model. To systematize…
The performance of optimizers, particularly in deep learning, depends considerably on their chosen hyperparameter configuration. The efficacy of optimizers is often studied under near-optimal problem-specific hyperparameters, and finding…
We focus on the problem of black-box adversarial attacks, where the aim is to generate adversarial examples for deep learning models solely based on information limited to output label~(hard label) to a queried data input. We propose a…
Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…
Performance modeling typically relies on two antithetic methodologies: white box models, which exploit knowledge on system's internals and capture its dynamics using analytical approaches, and black box techniques, which infer relations…
Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are widely used in recommender systems that require continuous, incremental learning. A core aspect of MABs is the exploration-exploitation trade-off: choosing between exploiting items likely to be…
Exploration is a crucial aspect of bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms. The uncertainty quantification necessary for exploration often comes from either closed-form expressions based on simple models or resampling and posterior…
Motivated by the problem of tuning hyperparameters in machine learning, we present a new approach for gradually and adaptively optimizing an unknown function using estimated gradients. We validate the empirical performance of the proposed…