Related papers: SlateFree: a Model-Free Decomposition for Reinforc…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for data science decision-making but suffers from sample inefficiency, particularly in real-world scenarios with costly physical interactions. This paper introduces a novel human-inspired framework to…
In this thesis, we develop a comprehensive account of the expressive power, modelling efficiency, and performance advantages of so-called trading agents (i.e., Deep Soft Recurrent Q-Network (DSRQN) and Mixture of Score Machines (MSM)),…
Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…
For marketing, we sometimes need to recommend content for multiple pages in sequence. Different from general sequential decision making process, the use cases have a simpler flow where customers per seeing recommended content on each page…
Spatial Transformer Networks (STN) can generate geometric transformations which modify input images to improve the classifier's performance. In this work, we combine the idea of STN with Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we break…
Slate recommendation generates a list of items as a whole instead of ranking each item individually, so as to better model the intra-list positional biases and item relations. In order to deal with the enormous combinatorial space of…
In many practical uses of reinforcement learning (RL) the set of actions available at a given state is a random variable, with realizations governed by an exogenous stochastic process. Somewhat surprisingly, the foundations for such…
The literature on Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) proposes several methods in order to sort alternatives evaluated on several attributes into ordered classes. Non Compensatory Sorting models (NCS) assign alternatives to classes…
We study a classification problem where each feature can be acquired for a cost and the goal is to optimize a trade-off between the expected classification error and the feature cost. We revisit a former approach that has framed the problem…
Can we design effective recommender systems free from users, IDs, and GNNs? Recommender systems are central to personalized content delivery across domains, with top-K item recommendation being a fundamental task to retrieve the most…
We study the reinforcement learning problem in the setting of finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and episode length $H$. We propose a model-free algorithm UCB-Advantage and prove that it…
In session-based or sequential recommendation, it is important to consider a number of factors like long-term user engagement, multiple types of user-item interactions such as clicks, purchases etc. The current state-of-the-art supervised…
In supervised learning, we fit a single statistical model to a given data set, assuming that the data is associated with a singular task, which yields well-tuned models for specific use, but does not adapt well to new contexts. By contrast,…
Scheduling plays an important role in automated production. Its impact can be found in various fields such as the manufacturing industry, the service industry and the technology industry. A scheduling problem (NP-hard) is a task of finding…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an appealing paradigm for training intelligent agents, enabling policy acquisition from the agent's own autonomously acquired experience. However, the training process of RL is far from automatic, requiring…
This paper presents the first model-free, simulator-free reinforcement learning algorithm for Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with sublinear regret and zero constraint violation. The algorithm is named Triple-Q because it…
As representation learning becomes a powerful technique to reduce sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL) in practice, theoretical understanding of its advantage is still limited. In this paper, we theoretically characterize the…
Recommender systems can be formulated as a matrix completion problem, predicting ratings from user and item parameter vectors. Optimizing these parameters by subsampling data becomes difficult as the number of users and items grows. We…
In this work, we consider the problem of collaborative multi-user reinforcement learning. In this setting there are multiple users with the same state-action space and transition probabilities but with different rewards. Under the…
Some of the most performant reinforcement learning algorithms today can be prohibitively expensive as they use test-time scaling methods such as sampling multiple action candidates and selecting the best one. In this work, we propose…