Related papers: Model Selection in Batch Policy Optimization
We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…
We study contextual stochastic optimization problems, where we leverage rich auxiliary observations (e.g., product characteristics) to improve decision making with uncertain variables (e.g., demand). We show how to train forest decision…
Selecting techniques is a crucial element of the business analysis approach planning in IT projects. Particular attention is paid to the choice of techniques for requirements elicitation. One of the promising methods for selecting…
Distributed training and increasing the gradient update frequency are practical strategies to accelerate learning and improve performance, but both exacerbate a central challenge: \textit{policy lag}, which is the mismatch between the…
Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…
The note studies the problem of selecting a good enough subset out of a finite number of alternatives under a fixed simulation budget. Our work aims to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting a good subset. We formulate…
The deployment of ever-larger machine learning models reflects a growing consensus that the more expressive the model class one optimizes over$\unicode{x2013}$and the more data one has access to$\unicode{x2013}$the more one can improve…
The design of data-driven formulations for machine learning and decision-making with good out-of-sample performance is a key challenge. The observation that good in-sample performance does not guarantee good out-of-sample performance is…
Offline model-based optimization (MBO) seeks to discover high-performing designs using only a fixed dataset of past evaluations. Most existing methods rely on learning a surrogate model via regression and implicitly assume that good…
The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem with $M$ latent contexts, where an agent interacts with the environment for an episode of $H$ time steps. Depending on the length of the episode, the learner may not be able to estimate accurately…
We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary choice tasks as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant…
The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…
A central issue of many statistical learning problems is to select an appropriate model from a set of candidate models. Large models tend to inflate the variance (or overfitting), while small models tend to cause biases (or underfitting)…
The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…
How can robots learn and adapt to new tasks and situations with little data? Systematic exploration and simulation are crucial tools for efficient robot learning. We present a novel black-box policy search algorithm focused on…
In the last years decision-focused learning framework, also known as predict-and-optimize, have received increasing attention. In this setting, the predictions of a machine learning model are used as estimated cost coefficients in the…
An important challenge in robust machine learning is when training data is provided by strategic sources who may intentionally report erroneous data for their own benefit. A line of work at the intersection of machine learning and mechanism…
The ability to learn from large batches of autonomously collected data for policy improvement -- a paradigm we refer to as batch online reinforcement learning -- holds the promise of enabling truly scalable robot learning by significantly…
In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…