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Many decision-making processes involve evaluating and then selecting items; examples include scientific peer review, job hiring, school admissions, and investment decisions. The eventual selection is performed by applying rules or…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Alexander Goldberg , Giulia Fanti , Nihar B. Shah

In the uniformity testing task, an algorithm is provided with samples from an unknown probability distribution over a (known) finite domain, and must decide whether it is the uniform distribution, or, alternatively, if its total variation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Guy Blanc , Clément L. Canonne , Erik Waingarten

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), enhancing sample efficiency is crucial, particularly in scenarios when data acquisition is costly and risky. In principle, off-policy RL algorithms can improve sample efficiency by allowing multiple updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Hojoon Lee , Hanseul Cho , Hyunseung Kim , Daehoon Gwak , Joonkee Kim , Jaegul Choo , Se-Young Yun , Chulhee Yun

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

We study the design of sample-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in the presence of rich, high-dimensional observations, formalized via the Block MDP problem. Existing algorithms suffer from either 1) computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Zakaria Mhammedi , Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We consider the problem of Probably Approximate Correct (PAC) learning of a binary classifier from noisy labeled examples acquired from multiple annotators (each characterized by a respective classification noise rate). First, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Dinesh Garg , Sourangshu Bhattacharya , S. Sundararajan , Shirish Shevade

Several well-studied models of access to data samples, including statistical queries, local differential privacy and low-communication algorithms rely on queries that provide information about a function of a single sample. (For example, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-02 Vitaly Feldman , Badih Ghazi

Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-02 Daochen Wang , Xuchen You , Tongyang Li , Andrew M. Childs

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

We study the multinomial logit (MNL) bandit problem, where at each time step, the seller offers an assortment of size at most $K$ from a pool of $N$ items, and the buyer purchases an item from the assortment according to a MNL choice model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jiaqi Yang

We investigate the problem of batched best arm identification in multi-armed bandits, where we aim to identify the best arm from a set of $n$ arms while minimizing both the number of samples and batches. We introduce an algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Tianyuan Jin , Qin Zhang , Dongruo Zhou

Hu and Mehta (2024) posed an open problem: what is the optimal instance-dependent rate for the stochastic decision-theoretic online learning (with $K$ actions and $T$ rounds) under $\varepsilon$-differential privacy? Before, the best known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Ruihan Wu , Yu-Xiang Wang

The elicitation of an ordinal judgment on multiple alternatives is often required in many psychological and behavioral experiments to investigate preference/choice orientation of a specific population. The Plackett-Luce model is one of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-10-10 Cristina Mollica , Luca Tardella

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

Given a finite set of unknown distributions or arms that can be sampled, we consider the problem of identifying the one with the maximum mean using a $\delta$-correct algorithm (an adaptive, sequential algorithm that restricts the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Peter Glynn

This paper introduces a scalable approach for probabilistic top-k similarity ranking on uncertain vector data. Each uncertain object is represented by a set of vector instances that are assumed to be mutually-exclusive. The objective is to…

Databases · Computer Science 2009-07-17 Thomas Bernecker , Hans-Peter Kriegel , Nikos Mamoulis , Matthias Renz , Andreas Zuefle

In a typical supervised machine learning setting, the predictions on all test instances are based on a common subset of features discovered during model training. However, using a different subset of features that is most informative for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Yasitha Warahena Liyanage , Daphney-Stavroula Zois , Charalampos Chelmis

We revisit the problem of distribution learning within the framework of learning-augmented algorithms. In this setting, we explore the scenario where a probability distribution is provided as potentially inaccurate advice on the true,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Arnab Bhattacharyya , Davin Choo , Philips George John , Themis Gouleakis

The apparent difficulty of efficient distribution-free PAC learning has led to a large body of work on distribution-specific learning. Distributional assumptions facilitate the design of efficient algorithms but also limit their reach and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Guy Blanc , Jane Lange , Carmen Strassle , Li-Yang Tan