Related papers: Pure Exploration with Structured Preference Feedba…
We consider a problem of stochastic online learning with general probabilistic graph feedback, where each directed edge in the feedback graph has probability $p_{ij}$. Two cases are covered. (a) The one-step case, where after playing arm…
Today's robots are increasingly interacting with people and need to efficiently learn inexperienced user's preferences. A common framework is to iteratively query the user about which of two presented robot trajectories they prefer. While…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…
We formalize sequential decision-making with information acquisition as the probing-augmented user-centric selection (PUCS) framework, where a learner first probes a subset of arms to obtain side information on resources and rewards, and…
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…
The explosion of large-scale data in fields such as finance, e-commerce, and social media has outstripped the processing capabilities of single-machine systems, driving the need for distributed statistical inference methods. Traditional…
We propose a novel and efficient algorithm for the collaborative preference completion problem, which involves jointly estimating individualized rankings for a set of entities over a shared set of items, based on a limited number of…
We consider two settings of online learning to rank where feedback is restricted to top ranked items. The problem is cast as an online game between a learner and sequence of users, over $T$ rounds. In both settings, the learners objective…
Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit with fairness constraints is a framework where multiple arms form a super arm and can be pulled in each round under uncertainty to maximize cumulative rewards while ensuring the minimum average reward…
We study pure exploration problems in which the set of correct answers is possibly infinite. For example, such problems arise when regressing a continuous function on the means of the bandit or when learning Nash equilibria by querying…
Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…
We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…
We introduce and study a new class of stochastic bandit problems, referred to as predictive bandits. In each round, the decision maker first decides whether to gather information about the rewards of particular arms (so that their rewards…
Direct alignment algorithms have proven an effective step for aligning language models to human-desired behaviors. Current variants of the Direct Preference Optimization objective have focused on a strict setting where all tokens are…
We consider the best arm identification problem, where the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward from a set of $K$ arms under a limited sampling budget. This problem models many practical scenarios such as A/B testing. We…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
In this paper, we investigate the recommendation task in the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, purchases). State-of-the-art methods in this direction usually cast the problem as to learn a personalized ranking on a…
We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…
Interleaving is an online evaluation approach for information retrieval systems that compares the effectiveness of ranking functions in interpreting the users' implicit feedback. Previous work such as Hofmann et al (2011) has evaluated the…
Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…