Related papers: Parameterized Exploration
Combinatorial optimization is one of the fundamental research fields that has been extensively studied in theoretical computer science and operations research. When developing an algorithm for combinatorial optimization, it is commonly…
How do people navigate the exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off when making repeated choices with unknown rewards? We study this question through the lens of multi-armed bandit problems and introduce a novel behavioral model, Quantal…
The exploration/exploitation (E/E) dilemma arises naturally in many subfields of Science. Multi-armed bandit problems formalize this dilemma in its canonical form. Most current research in this field focuses on generic solutions that can be…
Dropped into an unknown environment, what should an agent do to quickly learn about the environment and how to accomplish diverse tasks within it? We address this question within the goal-conditioned reinforcement learning paradigm, by…
Personalization is important for search engines to improve user experience. Most of the existing work do pure feature engineering and extract a lot of session-style features and then train a ranking model. Here we proposed a novel way to…
This paper solves a new class of optimization problems under uncertainty, called Probable Event Constrained Optimization (PECO), which optimizes an objective function of decision variables and subjects to a set of Probable Event Constraints…
Policy Gradient methods that explore directly in parameter space are among the most effective and robust direct policy search methods and have drawn a lot of attention lately. The basic method from this field, Policy Gradients with…
Parameter estimation connects mathematical models to real-world data and decision making across many scientific and industrial applications. Standard approaches such as maximum likelihood estimation and Markov chain Monte Carlo estimate…
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…
Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…
We present a new method for statistical verification of quantitative properties over a partially unknown system with actions, utilising a parameterised model (in this work, a parametric Markov decision process) and data collected from…
In this work, we address the challenge of data-efficient exploration in reinforcement learning by examining existing principled, information-theoretic approaches to intrinsic motivation. Specifically, we focus on a class of exploration…
Interactive preference elicitation (IPE) aims to substantially reduce human effort while acquiring human preferences in wide personalization systems. Dueling bandit (DB) algorithms enable optimal decision-making in IPE building on pairwise…
We consider the problem of time-limited robotic exploration in previously unseen environments where exploration is limited by a predefined amount of time. We propose a novel exploration approach using learning-augmented model-based…
Bayesian optimization offers the possibility of optimizing black-box operations not accessible through traditional techniques. The success of Bayesian optimization methods such as Expected Improvement (EI) are significantly affected by the…
Autonomous exploration in dynamic environments necessitates a planner that can proactively respond to changes and make efficient and safe decisions for robots. Although plenty of sampling-based works have shown success in exploring static…
We study "incentivized exploration" (IE) in social learning problems where the principal (a recommendation algorithm) can leverage information asymmetry to incentivize sequentially-arriving agents to take exploratory actions. We identify…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables but the behavior policy depends on latent states (Tennenholtz et al. (2020a)). Prior…
In this paper, we learn dynamics models for parametrized families of dynamical systems with varying properties. The dynamics models are formulated as stochastic processes conditioned on a latent context variable which is inferred from…
Given a huge set of applicants, how should a firm allocate sequential resume screenings, phone interviews, and in-person site visits? In a tiered interview process, later stages (e.g., in-person visits) are more informative, but also more…