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Deep reinforcement learning is an increasingly popular technique for synthesising policies to control an agent's interaction with its environment. There is also growing interest in formally verifying that such policies are correct and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Edoardo Bacci , David Parker

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to Bayesian experimental design for non-exchangeable data that formulates it as risk-sensitive policy optimization. We develop the Inside-Out SMC$^2$ algorithm, a nested sequential Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-30 Sahel Iqbal , Adrien Corenflos , Simo Särkkä , Hany Abdulsamad

In this paper, we formulate the adaptive learning problem---the problem of how to find an individualized learning plan (called policy) that chooses the most appropriate learning materials based on learner's latent traits---faced in adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Xiao Li , Hanchen Xu , Jinming Zhang , Hua-hua Chang

For applications in healthcare, physics, energy, robotics, and many other fields, designing maximally informative experiments is valuable, particularly when experiments are expensive, time-consuming, or pose safety hazards. While existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Vincent Lim , Ellen Novoseller , Jeffrey Ichnowski , Huang Huang , Ken Goldberg

We introduce a gradient-based approach for the problem of Bayesian optimal experimental design to learn causal models in a batch setting -- a critical component for causal discovery from finite data where interventions can be costly or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Yashas Annadani , Panagiotis Tigas , Desi R. Ivanova , Andrew Jesson , Yarin Gal , Adam Foster , Stefan Bauer

In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-14 Christos Dimitrakakis

Models of many real-life applications, such as queuing models of communication networks or computing systems, have a countably infinite state-space. Algorithmic and learning procedures that have been developed to produce optimal policies…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-19 Saghar Adler , Vijay Subramanian

We consider the Markov Decision Process (MDP) of selecting a subset of items at each step, termed the Select-MDP (S-MDP). The large state and action spaces of S-MDPs make them intractable to solve with typical reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Hyungseok Song , Hyeryung Jang , Hai H. Tran , Se-eun Yoon , Kyunghwan Son , Donggyu Yun , Hyoju Chung , Yung Yi

We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Zhengling Qi , Peng Liao

Optimal designs are usually model-dependent and likely to be sub-optimal if the postulated model is not correctly specified. In practice, it is common that a researcher has a list of candidate models at hand and a design has to be found…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-03-29 Mingyao Ai , Holger Dette , Zhengfu Liu , Jun Yu

We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Jeremy McMahan , Xiaojin Zhu

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-09 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Xi Chen , Alan Malek

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

Sequential Bayesian experimental design typically assumes that the number of experiments is fixed before data collection begins. In practical campaigns, however, experimentation may need to terminate early because additional measurements…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-29 Chen Cheng , Xun Huan

Finding tight bounds on the optimal solution is a critical element of practical solution methods for discrete optimization problems. In the last decade, decision diagrams (DDs) have brought a new perspective on obtaining upper and lower…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-28 Quentin Cappart , Emmanuel Goutierre , David Bergman , Louis-Martin Rousseau

Optimally trading-off exploration and exploitation is the holy grail of reinforcement learning as it promises maximal data-efficiency for solving any task. Bayes-optimal agents achieve this, but obtaining the belief-state and performing…

Bayesian optimization is a methodology to optimize black-box functions. Traditionally, it focuses on the setting where you can arbitrarily query the search space. However, many real-life problems do not offer this flexibility; in…

Bayesian optimal experiments that maximize the information gained from collected data are critical to efficiently identify behavioral models. We extend a seminal method for designing Bayesian optimal experiments by introducing two…

Applications · Statistics 2025-03-19 Stefano Balietti , Brennan Klein , Christoph Riedl