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Related papers: Non-Asymptotic Pure Exploration by Solving Games

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Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

A natural goal in multiagent learning besides finding equilibria is to learn rationalizable behavior, where players learn to avoid iteratively dominated actions. However, even in the basic setting of multiplayer general-sum games, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Yuanhao Wang , Dingwen Kong , Yu Bai , Chi Jin

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff

Thompson sampling has proven effective across a wide range of stationary bandit environments. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, it can perform poorly when applied to non-stationary environments. We attribute such failures to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

Under the uncoupled learning setup, the last-iterate convergence guarantee towards Nash equilibrium is shown to be impossible in many games. This work studies the last-iterate convergence guarantee in general games toward rationalizability,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Jibang Wu , Haifeng Xu , Fan Yao

This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Jason Altschuler , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Alan Malek

A framework is introduced for actively and adaptively solving a sequence of machine learning problems, which are changing in bounded manner from one time step to the next. An algorithm is developed that actively queries the labels of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-31 Yuheng Bu , Jiaxun Lu , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

Partial monitoring is an expressive framework for sequential decision-making with an abundance of applications, including graph-structured and dueling bandits, dynamic pricing and transductive feedback models. We survey and extend recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Johannes Kirschner , Tor Lattimore , Andreas Krause

We address the problem of controlling a mobile robot to explore a partially known environment. The robot's objective is the maximization of the amount of information collected about the environment. We formulate the problem as a partially…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-03-08 Mikko Lauri , Risto Ritala

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Brendan O'Donoghue

We consider the \mnk{classical} problem of a controller activating (or sampling) sequentially from a finite number of $N \geq 2$ populations, specified by unknown distributions. Over some time horizon, at each time $n = 1, 2, \ldots$, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-18 Wesley Cowan , Michael N. Katehakis

We consider a multi-hypothesis testing problem involving a K-armed bandit. Each arm's signal follows a distribution from a vector exponential family. The actual parameters of the arms are unknown to the decision maker. The decision maker…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Gayathri R Prabhu , Srikrishna Bhashyam , Aditya Gopalan , Rajesh Sundaresan

Reinforcement Learning agents are expected to eventually perform well. Typically, this takes the form of a guarantee about the asymptotic behavior of an algorithm given some assumptions about the environment. We present an algorithm for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Michael K. Cohen , Elliot Catt , Marcus Hutter

Simple stochastic games are two-player zero-sum stochastic games with turn-based moves, perfect information, and reachability winning conditions. We present two new algorithms computing the values of simple stochastic games. Both of them…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-01 Hugo Gimbert , Florian Horn

We address the problem of multi-group mean estimation, which seeks to allocate a finite sampling budget across multiple groups to obtain uniformly accurate estimates of their means. Unlike classical multi-armed bandits, whose objective is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Ziyi Wei , Huaiyang Zhong , Xiaocheng Li

Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Bruce D. Lee , Ingvar Ziemann , George J. Pappas , Nikolai Matni

In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Reda Alami , Mohammed Mahfoud , Mastane Achab