Related papers: Empirical Bayes Selection for Value Maximization
In this paper, we study the problem of fair sequential decision making with biased linear bandit feedback. At each round, a player selects an action described by a covariate and by a sensitive attribute. The perceived reward is a linear…
The measurement of the efficiency of an event selection is always an important part of the analysis of experimental data. The statistical techniques which are needed to determine the efficiency and its uncertainty are reviewed. Frequentist…
Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically established algorithm for Bayesian optimization (BO), where we assume the objective function $f$ follows a GP. One notable drawback of GP-UCB is that the theoretical…
LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of- N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations…
Histogram-based empirical Bayes methods developed for analyzing data for large numbers of genes, SNPs, or other biological features tend to have large biases when applied to data with a smaller number of features such as genes with…
Empirical Bayes methods are widely used for large-scale estimation and inference in the Poisson means problem. Existing results establish theoretical properties of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) for optimal posterior…
Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically promising approach for black-box optimization; however, the confidence parameter $\beta$ is considerably large in the theorem and chosen heuristically in practice. Then,…
In many sequential decision problems, an agent performs a repeated task. He then suffers regret and obtains information that he may use in the following rounds. However, sometimes the agent may also obtain information and avoid suffering…
Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. However, there is a large discrepancy between the superior practical performance of these approaches and their theoretical…
We consider Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate experiments that generate vector-valued outcomes over which a decision-maker (DM) has preferences. These preferences are encoded by a utility function that is not known in closed…
We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…
Bayes factors for composite hypotheses have difficulty in encoding vague prior knowledge, as improper priors cannot be used and objective priors may be subjectively unreasonable. To address these issues I revisit the posterior Bayes factor,…
We propose a new empirical Bayes approach for inference in the $p \gg n$ normal linear model. The novelty is the use of data in the prior in two ways, for centering and regularization. Under suitable sparsity assumptions, we establish a…
Multi-armed bandits are widely used for sequential experimentation in clinical trials, recommendation systems, and online platforms. While regret minimization and valid inference from adaptively collected data have each been studied…
We consider a Bayesian approach to model selection in Gaussian linear regression, where the number of predictors might be much larger than the number of observations. From a frequentist view, the proposed procedure results in the penalized…
Most research in Bayesian optimization (BO) has focused on \emph{direct feedback} scenarios, where one has access to exact values of some expensive-to-evaluate objective. This direction has been mainly driven by the use of BO in machine…
We revisit empirical Bayes in the absence of a tractable likelihood function, as is typical in scientific domains relying on computer simulations. We investigate how the empirical Bayesian can make use of neural density estimators first to…
Empirical Bayes methods offer valuable tools for a large class of compound decision problems. In this tutorial we describe some basic principles of the empirical Bayes paradigm stressing their frequentist interpretation. Emphasis is placed…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) replaces hard-to-specify rewards with pairwise trajectory preferences, yet regret-oriented theory often assumes that preference labels are generated consistently from a single ground-truth…
Bayesian decision theory outlines a rigorous framework for making optimal decisions based on maximizing expected utility over a model posterior. However, practitioners often do not have access to the full posterior and resort to approximate…