Related papers: Beyond Ads: Sequential Decision-Making Algorithms …
We introduce a unified probabilistic framework for solving sequential decision making problems ranging from Bayesian optimisation to contextual bandits and reinforcement learning. This is accomplished by a probabilistic model-based approach…
Machine learning algorithms are now frequently used in sensitive contexts that substantially affect the course of human lives, such as credit lending or criminal justice. This is driven by the idea that `objective' machines base their…
A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal…
Calls for heightened consideration of fairness and accountability in algorithmically-informed public decisions---like taxation, justice, and child protection---are now commonplace. How might designers support such human values? We…
Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…
This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…
Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…
The notion that algorithmic systems should be "transparent" and "explainable" is common in the many statements of consensus principles developed by governments, companies, and advocacy organizations. But what exactly do policy and legal…
When developing reinforcement learning agents, the standard approach is to train an agent to converge to a fixed policy that is as close to optimal as possible for a single fixed reward function. If different agent behaviour is required in…
Digital deliberation has expanded democratic participation, yet challenges remain. This includes processing information at scale, moderating discussions, fact-checking, or attracting people to participate. Recent advances in artificial…
Risk assessment algorithms in criminal justice put people's lives at the discretion of a simple statistical tool. This thesis explores how algorithmic decision-making in criminal policy can exhibit feedback effects, where disadvantage…
In recent years, reinforcement learning and bandits have transformed a wide range of real-world applications including healthcare, finance, recommendation systems, robotics, and last but not least, the speech and natural language…
In the long term, reinforcement learning (RL) is considered by many AI theorists to be the most promising path to artificial general intelligence. This places RL practitioners in a position to design systems that have never existed before…
Advancements in machine learning have fuelled the popularity of using AI decision algorithms in procedures such as bail hearings (Feller et al. 2016), medical diagnoses (Rajkomar et al. 2018; Esteva et al. 2019) and recruitment (Heilweil…
As algorithms become an influential component of government decision-making around the world, policymakers have debated how governments can attain the benefits of algorithms while preventing the harms of algorithms. One mechanism that has…
Recent years have seen a significant amount of interests in Sequential Recommendation (SR), which aims to understand and model the sequential user behaviors and the interactions between users and items over time. Surprisingly, despite the…
Public sector agencies perform the critical task of implementing the redistributive role of the State by acting as the leading provider of critical public services that many rely on. In recent years, public agencies have been increasingly…
Online learning methods yield sequential regret bounds under minimal assumptions and provide in-expectation risk bounds for statistical learning. However, despite the apparent advantage of online guarantees over their statistical…
Reasoning with declarative knowledge (RDK) and sequential decision-making (SDM) are two key research areas in artificial intelligence. RDK methods reason with declarative domain knowledge, including commonsense knowledge, that is either…