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Related papers: Combinatorial Pure Exploration with Full-Bandit or…

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Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh

In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent must explore an initially unknown environment in order to learn a desired behaviour. When RL agents are deployed in real world environments, safety is of primary concern. Constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 David M. Bossens , Nicholas Bishop

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

We consider the problem of online combinatorial optimization under semi-bandit feedback. The goal of the learner is to sequentially select its actions from a combinatorial decision set so as to minimize its cumulative loss. We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-14 Gergely Neu , Gábor Bartók

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

Influence maximization, adaptive routing, and dynamic spectrum allocation all require choosing the right action from a large set of alternatives. Thanks to the advances in combinatorial optimization, these and many similar problems can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Alihan Hüyük , Cem Tekin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Alberto Caron , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

We introduce exploration via linear loss perturbations (EVILL), a randomised exploration method for structured stochastic bandit problems that works by solving for the minimiser of a linearly perturbed regularised negative log-likelihood…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-07 David Janz , Shuai Liu , Alex Ayoub , Csaba Szepesvári

We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Xiaoyu Chen , Han Zhong , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Liwei Wang

The difficulty in specifying rewards for many real-world problems has led to an increased focus on learning rewards from human feedback, such as demonstrations. However, there are often many different reward functions that explain the human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Zaynah Javed , Daniel S. Brown , Satvik Sharma , Jerry Zhu , Ashwin Balakrishna , Marek Petrik , Anca D. Dragan , Ken Goldberg

We propose combinatorial cascading bandits, a class of partial monitoring problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a tuple of ground items subject to constraints and receives a reward if and only if the weights of all chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-18 Branislav Kveton , Zheng Wen , Azin Ashkan , Csaba Szepesvari

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

We propose a bandit algorithm that explores purely by randomizing its past observations. In particular, the sufficient optimism in the mean reward estimates is achieved by exploiting the variance in the past observed rewards. We name the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Nan Wang , Branislav Kveton , Maryam Karimzadehgan

Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Archana Bura , Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai , Jean-Francois Chamberland

This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Clémence Réda , Sattar Vakili , Emilie Kaufmann

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Pure exploration in episodic Reinforcement Learning has primarily focused on Best Policy Identification (BPI), which seeks to identify a (near)-optimal policy with high confidence. Motivated by practical settings where a ``good enough''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

We advance the study of incentivized bandit exploration, in which arm choices are viewed as recommendations and are required to be Bayesian incentive compatible. Recent work has shown under certain independence assumptions that after…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Mark Sellke

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan