Related papers: Exploring validation metrics for offline model-bas…
Many real-world scientific and industrial applications require the optimization of expensive black-box functions. Bayesian Optimization (BO) provides an effective framework for such problems. However, traditional BO methods are prone to get…
Consider the following instance of the Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) problem: given the complete training logs of $N$ conventional RL agents, trained on $N$ different tasks, design a meta-agent that can quickly maximize reward…
Virtual cell (VC) models aim to predict cellular responses to any perturbations in silico and have emerged as a promising approach for drug discovery and precision medicine. Yet, a clear gap still remains: while models routinely reported…
Molecular property optimization (MPO) problems are inherently challenging since they are formulated over discrete, unstructured spaces and the labeling process involves expensive simulations or experiments, which fundamentally limits the…
Rule-based classification models described in the language of logic directly predict boolean values, rather than modeling a probability and translating it into a prediction as done in statistical models. The vast majority of existing…
This paper uncovers and explores the close relationship between Monte Carlo Optimization of a parametrized integral (MCO), Parametric machine-Learning (PL), and `blackbox' or `oracle'-based optimization (BO). We make four contributions.…
Recently, Meta-Black-Box Optimization with Reinforcement Learning (MetaBBO-RL) has showcased the power of leveraging RL at the meta-level to mitigate manual fine-tuning of low-level black-box optimizers. However, this field is hindered by…
Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…
Solid evaluation of neural machine translation (NMT) is key to its understanding and improvement. Current evaluation of an NMT system is usually built upon a heuristic decoding algorithm (e.g., beam search) and an evaluation metric…
Representation learning has been widely studied in the context of meta-learning, enabling rapid learning of new tasks through shared representations. Recent works such as MAML have explored using fine-tuning-based metrics, which measure the…
Markov Decision Problems (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for modelling sequential decision-making across diverse domains, guided by optimality criteria such as discounted and average rewards. However, these criteria have inherent…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) aims to make agents more sample-efficient, adaptive, and explainable by learning an explicit model of the environment. While the capabilities of MBRL agents have significantly improved in recent…
An algorithmic decision-maker incentivizes people to act in certain ways to receive better decisions. These incentives can dramatically influence subjects' behaviors and lives, and it is important that both decision-makers and…
Diffusion models have recently emerged as expressive policy representations for online reinforcement learning (RL). However, their iterative generative processes introduce substantial training and inference overhead. To overcome this…
The evaluation of recommender system fairness has become increasingly important, especially with recent legislation that emphasises the development of fair and responsible artificial intelligence. This has led to the emergence of various…
Optimisation algorithms are commonly compared on benchmarks to get insight into performance differences. However, it is not clear how closely benchmarks match the properties of real-world problems because these properties are largely…
In real-world problems, uncertainties (e.g., errors in the measurement, precision errors) often lead to poor performance of numerical algorithms when not explicitly taken into account. This is also the case for control problems, where…
Offline black-box optimization aims to maximize a black-box function using an offline dataset of designs and their measured properties. Two main approaches have emerged: the forward approach, which learns a mapping from input to its value,…
Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many…