Related papers: Heuristic Stopping Rules For Technology-Assisted R…

In both industrial and service domains, a central benefit of the use of robots is their ability to quickly and reliably execute repetitive tasks. However, even relatively simple peg-in-hole tasks are typically subject to stochastic…

This paper reviews the reasons that Human-in-the-Loop is both critical for preventing widely-understood failure modes for machine learning, and not a practical solution. Following this, we review two current heuristic methods for addressing…

A commonly used heuristic in RL is experience replay (e.g.~\citet{lin1993reinforcement, mnih2015human}), in which a learner stores and re-uses past trajectories as if they were sampled online. In this work, we initiate a rigorous study of…

The goal of screening prioritisation in systematic reviews is to identify relevant documents with high recall and rank them in early positions for review. This saves reviewing effort if paired with a stopping criterion, and speeds up review…

While safe reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for many practical applications like robotics or autonomous cars, current approaches require specifying constraints in mathematical form. Such specifications demand domain…

The causes of the reproducibility crisis include lack of standardization and transparency in scientific reporting. Checklists such as ARRIVE and CONSORT seek to improve transparency, but they are not always followed by authors and peer…

We propose Referral-Augmented Retrieval (RAR), a simple technique that concatenates document indices with referrals, i.e. text from other documents that cite or link to the given document, to provide significant performance gains for…

Inspired by advances in LLMs, reasoning-enhanced sequential recommendation performs multi-step deliberation before making final predictions, unlocking greater potential for capturing user preferences. However, current methods are…

Contextual learning seeks to learn a decision policy that maps an individual's characteristics to an action through data collection. In operations management, such data may come from various sources, and a central question is when data…

Recommender systems are software tools used to generate and provide suggestions for items and other entities to the users by exploiting various strategies. Hybrid recommender systems combine two or more recommendation strategies in…

In evaluation campaigns, participants often explore variations of popular, state-of-the-art baselines as a low-risk strategy to achieve competitive results. While effective, this can lead to local "hill climbing" rather than more radical…

Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these…

Active learning (AL) is a promising ML paradigm that has the potential to parse through large unlabeled data and help reduce annotation cost in domains where labeling data can be prohibitive. Recently proposed neural network based AL…

Continual learning refers to the problem where the training data is available in sequential chunks, termed "tasks". The majority of progress in continual learning has been stunted by the problem of catastrophic forgetting, which is caused…

We consider the setting of iterative learning control, or model-based policy learning in the presence of uncertain, time-varying dynamics. In this setting, we propose a new performance metric, planning regret, which replaces the standard…

Given a malfunctioning system, sequential diagnosis aims at identifying the root cause of the failure in terms of abnormally behaving system components. As initial system observations usually do not suffice to deterministically pin down…

In this chapter, we consider generative information retrieval evaluation from two distinct but interrelated perspectives. First, large language models (LLMs) themselves are rapidly becoming tools for evaluation, with current research…

A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these…

Practical machine learning systems often operate in multiple sequential stages, as seen in ranking and recommendation systems, which typically include a retrieval phase followed by a ranking phase. Effectively assessing prediction…

Real-world robotic tasks often require agents to achieve sequences of goals while respecting time-varying safety constraints. However, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms are fundamentally limited in these settings. A natural…