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Bayesian optimisation has proven to be a powerful tool for expensive global black-box optimisation problems. In this paper, we propose new Bayesian optimisation variants of the popular Knowledge Gradient acquisition functions for problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Xietao Wang Lin , Juan Ungredda , Max Butler , James Town , Alma Rahat , Hemant Singh , Juergen Branke

The main objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework to analyse how humans' decision-making strategies under uncertainty manage the trade-off between information gathering (exploration) and reward seeking (exploitation). A…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Antonio Candelieri , Andrea Ponti , Francesco Archetti

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Federico Errica

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

To acquire a new skill, humans learn better and faster if a tutor, based on their current knowledge level, informs them of how much attention they should pay to particular content or practice problems. Similarly, a machine learning model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Xinyi Wang , Hieu Pham , Paul Michel , Antonios Anastasopoulos , Jaime Carbonell , Graham Neubig

Robots can learn to imitate humans by inferring what the human is optimizing for. One common framework for this is Bayesian reward learning, where the robot treats the human's demonstrations and corrections as observations of their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Joshua Hoegerman , Dylan P. Losey

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Game theory has been increasingly applied in settings where the game is not known outright, but has to be estimated by sampling. For example, meta-games that arise in multi-agent evaluation can only be accessed by running a succession of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Tabish Rashid , Cheng Zhang , Kamil Ciosek

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

In humans and other animals, category learning enhances discrimination between stimuli close to the category boundary. This phenomenon, called categorical perception, was also empirically observed in artificial neural networks trained on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Laurent Bonnasse-Gahot , Jean-Pierre Nadal

Animal learning has interested ecologists and psychologists for over a century. Mathematical models that explain how animals store and recall information have gained attention recently. Central to this work is statistical decision theory…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2022-08-29 Peter R. Thompson , Melodie Kunegel-Lion , Mark A. Lewis

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Bayesian optimisation is a well-known sample-efficient method for the optimisation of expensive black-box functions. However when dealing with big search spaces the algorithm goes through several low function value regions before reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-31 Anil Ramachandran , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Cheng Li , Svetha Venkatesh

Solving a reinforcement learning problem typically involves correctly prespecifying the reward signal from which the algorithm learns. Here, we approach the problem of reward signal design by using an evolutionary approach to perform a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Rafal Muszynski , Katja Hofmann , Jun Wang

We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-02-10 Xiaoting Zhao , Peter I. Frazier

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Adam X. Yang , Maxime Robeyns , Thomas Coste , Zhengyan Shi , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Laurence Aitchison